The bumblebee is quite a common insect and there is nothing that really stands out except
for the fact that it has been the source of a mathematical controversy for almost a
whole century.
The University of Gottingen ran some calculations in the 1930s and came to a conclusion
that it was aerodnamically impossible for the bumblebee to fly, but the bumblebee
still flew without giving a flying f*ck and this is what gave birth to The Bumblebee
Paradox.
SOURCE: GOOGLE
The Bumblebee Paradox was such a big paradox that it even influenced the title of
a famous children's book The Bumblebee Flies Anyway by Robert Cormier.
The paradox continued to baffle the minds of people till 1996 when researchers
at the University of Cambridge's Department of Zoology built scaled-up robotic
models of insects to study in detail the airflow around their flapping wings.
The team which was headed by Animal Mechanics specialist Charlie Ellington, found
results that seemed to solve the problem. They discovered that extra aerodynamic
lift was generated by a vortex travelling along the leading edge of the insect's
wings during a downstroke.
But the paradox was not that easy to solve. Researchers Michael Dickinson and
James Birch, from the University of California at Berkeley recently suggested in the
journal Nature that the the flight of the bumblebee may still be as confusing
as it was.
To avoid the difficulty of building and working with tiny mechanical insects, they
built a greatly scaled-up model of a fruit fly and observed it flapping in a tank
of mineral oil. This simulated the experience of a tiny real-life fruit fly
flapping in the much thinner medium of air.
Based on these experiments the researchers concluded that the Cambridge hypothesis
could not explain the attachment of the vortex throughout the stroke. And hence
The Bumblebee Paradox still remains unsolved. And I still wonder though,
how does the bumblebee fly?