onsdag 23 maj 2012

New Theory of Flight Submitted to AIAA


The  new mathematical theory of flight explaining why it is possible to fly developed together with Johan Hoffman and Johan Jansson has now been submitted to AIAA, The World's Forum for Aerospace Leadership and can be inspected as New Theory of Flight.

The new theory is backed with solid mathematics, physics, computation in close agreement with experimental observation.

The new theory shows in particular that the existing theory propagated in text books and university education based on Kutta-Zhukovsky circulation theory for lift and Prandtl's boundary layer theory for drag, is incorrect from both mathematical and physics point of view.

The new theory challenges a paradigm of fluid mechanics formed by Prandtl as The Father of Modern Fluid Mechanics, which has ruled uncontested for 100 years. We known by Kuhn's analysis of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions that a change of scientific paradigm is not a kids game and strong opposition to the New Theory is to be expected.

It is hard to believe that man learned to master flight during the 20th century based on a  mathematical theory which does not describe anything close to real physics, yet it so happened. This was only possible with a strict separation between theory and practice, which is against the first principle of science.

The New Theory has new strong support while the arguments of the Old Theory have not improved over 100 years as an indication of not strength but weakness. The New Theory requires major revisions of text books.

The review process by AIAA will be one of the battle grounds between the New and the Old Theory of Flight, and will reported.

My blog The Secret of Flight presents the New Theory in easily accessible form for a wider audience including background material and perspectives, see also Scientific Revolutions: New vs Old Theory.


2 kommentarer:

  1. Good Luck. Since I first heard of this theory through your Normat article I have been very fascinated by it and discussed it with dozens and dozens of people on a popular level but during the same time I have noticed the difficulty of getting "expert recognition" for it. Let's hope the theory gets some serious consideration this time. You say that change of a scientific paradigm is not a kids game and you are right. But yet I can't help suspecting that a somewhat less conflicting approach from the beginning could have made things easier. After all, (what turns out to be) new paradigms are generally not proclaimed beforehand but rather distinguished as a major shift retrospectively.

    SvaraRadera
  2. Thanks Ola. The publication in Normat was an important first step and now we take the next in AIAA. It is true that the success of an attempted revolution is determined a posteriori and then the winner writes the history, but it is important that the New Theory expresses a clear difference from the Old Theory, and this is what we do in our presentations. Science is not like politics geared by clever compromise, but as in religion the opposite of non-compromise with a clear distinction between Heaven and Hell. Right?

    SvaraRadera