When I was in college, not so many eons ago, it was pretty much an article of faith among us intellectual iconoclasts that, though we could put a man on the moon, we still had no idea how a bumblebee could fly. Do we? –Keith Hanson, Silver Spring, Maryland
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Of course. You think this is on a par with quantum mechanics or something? The basic principles of bumblebee flight, and insect flight generally, have been pretty well understood for maybe 40 years. Somehow, though, the idea that bees “violate aerodynamic theory” got embedded in folklore. It probably sprang from a faulty analogy between bees and conventional fixed-wing aircraft. Bees’ wings are small relative to their bodies; if an airplane were built the same way, it’d never get off the ground. But bees aren’t like airplanes, they’re like helicopters. Their wings work on the same principle as helicopter blades–to be precise, “reverse-pitch semirotary helicopter blades,” to quote one authority. A moving airfoil, whether it’s a helicopter blade or a bee wing, generates a lot more lift than a stationary one.
You’ve been spending too much time reading Popular Science, Flash. Also, I don’t know that I’d place much faith in the technological insight of kinetic sculptors–most of those guys barely know how to operate a can opener. It’s possible to transmit power through space using a microwave beam, but that’s not “broadcast” power in the sense you mean. True broadcast power would involve incredible waste and probably kill everybody besides. Scientists nowadays worry about the possible injurious effects of the electric fields around wires–imagine what might happen if the juice was just poured into the air.
