Lift
i usually try not to really mention what i’m thinking here, as it is my general supposition that no one really cares, but today will be an exception. i’m not even going to pretend that any more than 3 people in america might find me insiteful, but i figured i’d just put it out here.
today, i thought about lift. i was on a flight to OKC and began thinking about the whole concept of lift. if you ever want to freak yourself out while on a plane you should really focus on the physical forces at work in lift – i mean just stare a the wing and think “air supports this. no really, it’s just air”.
for anyone who may be unawares, the central concept in flight isn’t the speed of the plane (though it’s obviously important), but lift. part of the concept is that the top edge of a wing is longer than the bottom edge and so the air travelling above the wing is faster, and therefore pressure is lower above the wing “lifting” the wing up. the other piece of lift is the whole “equal and opposite reaction” bit with the wing “turning” the air downward and pushing the wing upward. anyway, when you’re on a plane and you look out at that flimsy wing supporting that turgid fuselage 5 miles off the ground it’s sort of weird to think that it’s airflow that is actually keeping everything in flight.
what i discovered, is that if you sit there and really focus on lift, it can be almost impossible to convince yourself that it should work. i mean, you’re actually in flight, so you KNOW on some level that it works, but you can totally convince yourself that it’ll stop working at any moment. isn’t it bizarre that it can seem more natural to have a completely irrational fear about something you have obvious empircal evidence of than to trust a concept because it seems difficult to belive in? are people geared to mistrust things or does it come from experience? you know lift works, but it doesn’t seem like it should. you can fly while convincing yourself that, not just your flight, but the entire concept of flight shouldn’t work.
i think that’s why faith is so important in life and in relationships.
if you think too hard about almost any concept, you can convince yourself it shouldn’t work. soooo, we are offered two options. you can either spend your life watching the wing and making sure it keeps remembering to bend the wind, or you can just sit back and enjoy the flight. i think i’ll just keep enjoying the flight.
