[mthomasmw]

Do you have a link handy for "we don't know how bikes work" ?

[SkyBelow]

I'm assuming they mean the balance mechanism, and specifically what allows us to balance. How much is it the rider shifting their weight, how much is micro steering adjusts as we move forward, how much is the gyroscopic forces of the wheels, how much of it has to do with the angle of the handle bars to the wheel verse the center of weight.

That said, I'm guessing this one is well understood by experts, but more complex than someone would assume at first glance, and many who have some understanding likely have an incorrect or at least incomplete understanding of how balancing works.

[reaperman]

We have self-balancing bicycles. We clearly know it well enough to replace the human with a computerized machine.

Maybe we don’t know how humans use the bicycle but we know how bicycles balance, we can write programs to balance them physically.

0: https://youtu.be/Ya7iacmVjUM

1: https://youtu.be/2Z67NkvXIF4

[BizarroLand]

I wonder what learning the specific system by which bikes are balanced would teach us about the world or human beings?

It's such a banal thing to be so fascinating.

[hughw]

e.g. What keeps bicycles balanced with or without a rider is still an active area of research, and even the seemingly basic idea that, for a bicycle to be self-stable, it needs to turn the handlebars into the fall, has not yet been proven.

[*]https://ciechanow.ski/bicycle/

[IshKebab]

"Active area of research" is quite different to "we don't know how they work".

We know how they work. We might not have fully characterised the stability conditions, but that's not the same thing.

[hinkley]

As a bit of an aside, most people don't know how bicycle wheels work. There's a whole section in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bicycle_Wheel that talks about how they actually work. It's not tension at the top, it's compression on the bottom.

[denimnerd42]

what do you mean it's not tension at the top? did you misspeak? bicycle spokes are solely under tensile forces. they can't support compressive forces at all. i'm a hobbyist wheel builder and a once upon a time professional bicycle mechanic during hs & college.

if you want to test this take nearly all the pretension out of your spokes and sit on your bike. feel which ones are taught and which ones are completely loose. or just go to walmart. those bikes hardly have any pretension in their wheels.

[matsemann]

Not to appeal to authority, but I wrote my thesis on bicycle wheels. You got it the wrong way around.

[hatsunearu]

Yeah, that's complete crap. Bike dynamics is well researched and the instability and stability mechanisms are numerous but well understood.

[post-it]

I'm not super interested in watching Joe Rogan and RFK, is there a particular bit where they talk about bikes?

[riversflow]

I think that is the wrong link?