Cyclical Phenomena

 

A few months ago I wrote an article about curling and the mysterious element in the sport that nobody can explain, see: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2026/02/curling-mystery.html. I have since come across something very similar in a video by one of the most distinctive science YouTubers, Simon Whistler, the most charismatic baldy since... well, me. It's all about bicycles. This is a mode of transport that is surprisingly recent. The first one was invented in Scotland in 1839. For such a relatively simple machine I'm surprised nobody thought of it a long time before. For comparison, the first working steam locomotive was invented less than forty years previously; and the first car was put on the market barely forty years later. You'd think those two were far greater engineering challenges. The "safety bike", one with frame mounted pedals and a chain drive connected to a crank on the rear wheel, was first built in the 1880's. It was so called because if you fell off it wasn't from such a great height as you would from a penny-farthing. The safety's design worked so well it remains fundamentally unchanged to the present day. I was therefore very surprised when I found out that there are phenomena associated with bicycles that cannot be explained. The simplicity of the mechanism should mean that the physics of its function would be comprehensive to a pre-Newtonian; but no.

A bike only has two wheels and stays upright by the rider making constant tiny movements to its direction that counters its inevitable imbalance. The rider can also do this by shifting their weight slightly. It takes a while for a new rider to achieve this, but after a bit of experience this movement becomes automatic and subconscious. This should mean that a bicycle moving without a rider should immediately topple over, but it doesn't always. Under some conditions a riderless bike will keep going for as long as it has forward motion. If you push it down a hill this could be for miles. Why? Well, one theory from the late nineteenth century is that the rotating wheels remain in a rigid state because they are spinning, rather like a gyroscopes. This was disputed in the 1970's. Another theory is that the front wheel acts like a caster on a shopping trolley, slightly trailing the centre of its steering axis; but this was eventually also discredited at about the same time. So what is the real cause of this strange self-balancing effect; and why does it not work on a bike with a rider? This movie clip demonstrates the difference, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMV0PCUzkag. Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJkJvS2ou1E. As with the curling conundrum, this is another example of how the very simplest of physical systems sometimes reveal themselves to be only a thin veil of the mundane covering the unfathomable. I like the quote at the end of the source video by the science writer Michael Brooks. Who needs black holes and dark matter when we have bike enigmas that evade explanation even more? Would an equivalent of CERN be necessary for us to find out how a bicycle really works? It makes me wonder about perpetual motion, and also the strange properties of Eric Laithwaite's spinning wheel; see the background link. There is definitely something fundamental about the universe we have yet to find out; and the initial clue has come from a machine that millions of people use every day for transport.
See here for background: https://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2020/08/free-energy-portal.html.

More Summer Horror

 

Who needs the Met Office when you have newspapers? The Daily Mirror has published an article that claims we're about to experience a "blast", meaning a period of warm summer weather. The temperatures are illustrated differently on modern weather maps. The cheerful circular dots with numbers in have been replaced by coloured thermal contours that deepen with redness to indicate more heat. It looks as if Great Britain is bleeding and festering under the deadly sun. The forecast states that this new heatwave will manifest by late next week? How can they know that? British weather cannot be predicted that far into the future. Even the Met Office themselves have admitted that after about eight days, judging the conditions becomes mostly guesswork... unless it's being engineered of course. Source: https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/heatwave-weather-forecast-met-office-37234011. Of course if the heatwave does appear the Mirror can say its prediction was accurate. Weather forecasts used to be fun and humourous, a uniquely British kind of media phenomenon. Now they are loaded with frightening imagery and portents of doom. The unspoken moral of the story is that we need tyrannical world government now to relieve us of this mortal danger.

See here for background: https://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2021/11/climate-change-portal.html.

And: https://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2022/02/chemtrails-portal.html.