Very cool article. For example: butterflies accumulate a positive charge when beating their wings, which causes pollen to jump through the air toward them when they land on flowers.
Very cool article. For example: butterflies accumulate a positive charge when beating their wings, which causes pollen to jump through the air toward them when they land on flowers.
https://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/gold/pdfs/purcell.pdf https://swizec.com/blog/week-9-life-at-low-reynolds-number/
When you are very small (like an ant), it is the other way around.
Toss a mouse from a building. It will land, shake itself off and scamper away. But if similarly dropped, “… a rat is killed, a man is broken, a horse splashes.” So wrote J.B.S. Haldane in his 1926 essay "On Being the Right Size." https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27082
How complicated would it be for a small insect to explain gravity, if they're not normally affected by it in their daily routine?
I recently thought about something similar: it seems like at certain scales, things turn into spheres, based on applicable forces. And then there are in-between regions with chaos. Atoms seem mostly round. Humans are not. If planets and stars are at the next spherical scale, are there even larger structures out there that once again show spherical nature, once you're past galaxies, clusters and filaments?