Cool little quiz I found (since it's the cool thing to do these days). Basically, if you sent to the year 0, how much do you know about every day technology to be awesome? Link I ended up with 7 out of 10. Not bad, according to the witty thing at the end, I might be able to reach the 17th-19th century.
I got seven, too. Though reviewing the answers, how on Earth does the first wing profile produce the most lift?
The air moves faster accross the top, higher speed equals lower pressure, which means the pressure difference pushes the wing up. Look up the Bernoulli effect (make sure you have the correct spelling as well because I am not sure about my own). EDIT: I got 5/10 I am a comp. sci. amjor and physics/math geek not a chemist...
But there's less resistance underneath the first option, as it's flat, so surely the air would be moving slower above the wing, creating the vacuum below, causing drag.
If you start from the point on the front of the wing and end at the back point you travel furth across the top than the bottom, but the time it takes is the same for both (remember it's the plane moving and pushing the air out of the way) which means the air moving across the top is moving faster than the air moving across the bottom.
Not on paper planes, it doesn't. Though fair enough. Sorta makes sense now, and seeing as physics is the only science I don't do, I guess I should take your, Bernoulli's, Wikipedia's, physic's and reality's word for it.
The subject I am most knowledgable in right now is Math, but I understand Physics intuitively and hope to be a CS wizard in 3 years (if I am not I might have a hard time finding a job...). Anyways to answer your query you are right this doesn't work for paper airplanes. Taking advantage of the Bernoulli principle to create lift intentionally increases the coeficient of friction of the wing. On a actual airplane this isn't a problem because it has engines that are constanly putting out force to maintain the planes speed. On a paper airplane which gets all of its energy from the initial launch this is a bad thing because it will slow down faster, and since most paper airplanes are launched with a minor upward angle this means they will fall faster. In essence the Bernoulli principle when applied to flight lets us create upward force by increasing the resistance to forward motion, which allows an airplane to have all of its engines apply force in one direction versus multiple directions (which was extremely important when most planes only had a single).
I got 5 right, five wrong, then when I did it again, ruling out most of the answers, knowing on most of them 2 choices, I got 8. Cool quiz I guess.
