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Bumblebees and Frame Rate
For years it was posited that bumblebees could not fly — they simply could not displace enough air to make it possible. Nobody told the bees, of course, so they carried on anyway.
It turns out that the camera used to film bumblebees had a frame rate that captured half the bumblebee’s flaps, and nobody knew that the bee flapped twice as quickly as they thought it did — and so it flew.
I saw a tweet today where the frame rate of the camera shows a helicopter’s blades not moving at all. It is neat — check it out! Which reminded me of the bee, of course.
There is a deeper lesson here: we are limited by our instruments and very often don’t realize it. So instruments that do exactly what they are designed to do may nevertheless lead to erroneous conclusions. Hence, the bumblebee.
I thought it might be cool to hear from the engineers and scientists (or maybe even poets) on your stories of how instruments did their job, but people learned very incorrect lessons nevertheless. Please, share with the community!
Published in General
I had a very bad case of pneumonia once and was in the hospital ICU for a time. As time went on, I began to improve. X-rays were being taken to determine the state of my lungs. At one point the doctor told me that even though I was obviously improved that the x-rays had not changed significantly. He said that it is common that the patient improves before it can be detected on x-rays and said that there is a joke among doctors that the patient recovered, but the x-rays died. Apparently x-rays can’t measure something that is related to the patient’s overall health and well-being.
Odd you mention it just now!
I’d woken up thinking about chords and harmonics Sunday morning–I’d written my R. comment about the phone stuff recently.
It suddenly struck me that a common way that we voice a sonorous chord is to start with 1-5-1-3 (C-G-C-E, say)–the first four overtones of the C below, and that this pattern must be what the ear is hearing when reconstructing missing fundamentals. It has two different psychological applications, but they must be related somehow.
Then after a church service that morning, I commented about just loving the fillings-rattling low note she’d played in one piece during the service. What pitch was that? Turns out it was a C1, but she told me it had been written for a 32′ pipe, which we lack.
She explained the organist’s trick of playing the low note plus the fifth. Which must be related to the organ-building phenomenon you are speak of.
It creates the perception of a pitch one octave lower.
On the way home, it suddenly hit me that the organists trick was the same phenomenon as the telephone one, and the esthetic one I’d “discovered” while idly thinking.
So, that makes four inter-related cases of a phenonomon–yours, two from my head, and one from the organist–all striking my mind within hours or a couple days of each other, all by coincidence.
Amazing how things resonate.
[Smiling, yea verily nearly Chortling Out Loud] Your sense of humor is as strange as mine. Until now, I’d always thought that I didn’t really fit in here.
I still do. But now I think there are two people who don’t really fit in here.
We’ll just occupy until they chase us out.