Comments on: Airplane on a Treadmill Definitive Analysis

By: Jay Cz

Jay Cz — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 03:07:24 +0000

I’m with Mike O. When I read the problem, I interpreted it as “Blah-blah-blah-totally-unrealistic-mechanism-blah-blah-blah-there’s-no-airflow-over-the-wings.” Answer: no takeoff.

By: Mike O

Mike O — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 19:50:31 +0000

Is that the one with the egg-shaped cages that spin around? I almost barfed on that once.

By: Ned

Ned — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 16:19:30 +0000

Right! Let’s rephrase it this way: “Suppose the landing gear of an unstoppable rocket plane was encased in immovable cement…”

By: Mike O

Mike O — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 15:00:46 +0000

I think the problem everyone has with the problem is the treadmill. Having spent a lot of time answering science question, I’ve seen a lot of “Thought-problem Telephone”, where an intricately worded (often allegorical) problem is posed by some professor in a graduate level class; one of the students repeats it to the undergaduates he’s TAing; the undergraduate becomes an assistant teacher and poses the question to the class; and finally one of the students posts a question to the MadScientistNetwork about why can’t you just use a glass box and watch the cat through the whole experiment (or “why does it have to be a cat?”). This problem sounds more like it should read, “if by some mechanism an airplane could not translate forward relative to the ground, could it take off,” and some reelly smart person sed, “some mechanism?! Why, your describing a treadmill!” and then posted his/her version to the web. From all of the posts and comments, “treadmill” was not what the original problem was describing.