The Magnus Effect

By Anupum Pant

This new video by Veritasium has been hiding from almost no one who’s been online in the last few days. I saw it even trending on Facebook. And is clearly enlightening. What impresses me the most is that simple science is being demonstrated in a very interesting way and it is making a mark. Happy about that.

Magnus effect is when a ball or a cyllinder moving in a fluid like air deviates away from it’s predicted path because of the spin. You can see it happening all the time if you carefully see soccer balls, cricket balls and baseballs being thrown with a spin.

Now who’d think there’d be any applications to thsi effect. That is where the genius of Veritasium comes in. There are ships with big rotating cylinders on the top which use the flowing air to make them more energy efficient.

In fact, the flettner aircraft has no wings and it uses the magnus effect to fly around. It was interesting to see the toy fly with a cylindrical wing. Sadly, embedding seems to have been disabled…

[Applications of magnus effect]

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