Flight of a Bumblebee
Whenever you think of the current state of science and what is possible and impossible - remember bumblebees. According to our venerable science, it is impossible for bumblebees to fly, but bumblebees don't know that, so they fly anyway - lucky for them they didn't go to school where experts in science attempted to convince them that they should stop fantasizing about flying. They don't even wonder whether they can or can't - they just fly!
On average, a bumblebee travels at a rate of 3 meters per second, beating its wings 130 times per second. That's quite respectable for the insect world.
How did this business of proving that a bumblebee can't fly originate? Who started the story?
One set of accounts suggests that the story first surfaced in Germany in the 1930s. One evening at dinner, a prominent aerodynamicist happened to be talking to a biologist, who asked about the flight of bees. To answer the biologist's query, the engineer did a quick "back-of-the-napkin" calculation.
To keep things simple, he assumed a rigid, smooth wing, estimated the bee's weight and wing area, and calculated the lift generated by the wing. Not surprisingly, there was insufficient lift. That was about all he could do at a dinner party. The detailed calculations had to wait. To the biologist, however, the aerodynamicist's initial failure was sufficient evidence of the superiority of nature to mere engineering.
Some accounts associate the story with students of physicist Ludwig Prandtl (1875–1953) of the University of Göttingen in Germany. Others identify the researcher who did the calculation as Swiss gas dynamicist Jacob Ackeret (1898–1981).
However, another thread of evidence points to French entomologist Antoine Magnan. In 1934, Magnan included the following passage in the introduction to his book Le Vol des Insectes:
Tou d'abord poussé par ce qui fait en aviation, j'ai appliqué aux insectes les lois de la résistance de l'air, et je suis arrivé avec M. Sainte-Lague a cette conclusion que leur vol est impossible.
Magnan's reference is to a calculation by his assistant André Saint-Lagué, who was apparently an engineer.
What isn't clear is how this brief note in a scholarly book made its way into popular culture and how it came to be associated specifically with bumblebees.
In some way, the story has done its share to inspire further research. In recent years, scientists have tackled the problem of insect flight from a number of different angles and gained new insights into the complexities of powered flight.
Some of these researchers inevitably refer to the "bumblebees can't fly" story in their own remarks to the press and even in published reports, while pointing to the "new, improved" model to describe insect flight.
The word problems typically found in textbooks often serve as rudimentary models of reality. Their applicability to real life, however, depends on the validity of the assumptions that underlie the statement of the problem.
c) 2004, Dr. Laura De Giorgio,
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