Five Equations That Changed The World

Five Equations That Changed The World

“He [Isaac Newton] sought out secluded areas, where he would sit for hours at a time, not so much to observe the natural world as to immerse himself in it”

Sir Isaac Newton was a man who would keep to himself. If not for that quality he may not have made the discoveries that he did. He would often sit in the garden for hours on end just thinking and formulating his ideas about the universe. In fact, that is the very place where the ideas of gravity and centrifugal force first came to him. He noticed an apple fall, and wondered why the apple fell to the earth but the moon didn’t. His discoveries about gravity led to his equation “E = G x M x m x d^2”, which means “the force of gravity is equal to the gravitational constant multiplied by the two masses involved divided by the square of the distance between them. This equation told scientists in NASA how to escape gravity and leave the earth to go to the moon.

“In other words, there appeared to be a trade-off between pressure and speed: The smaller the speed, the greater the pressure, or the greater the speed, the smaller the pressure”

This is a great discovery of Bernoulli. It seems to make sense when we apply it to blood vessels. Where the blood moves faster, the more it pushes forward, the less it pushes on the walls. A later more ingenious application for this idea is flying. The airplane was invented after Bernoulli but not due to him. The airplane and Bernoulli’s equation

“P + p x ½v^2 = CONSTANT”, were not connected until a Russian scientist by the name of Nikolai Zhukovsky made an excellent observation. He noticed that the tops of the wings of the plane were rounded. When he tested a plane in a wind tunnel, he noticed that the wings created two jet streams, an upper and a lower. The upper jet stream was narrower than the lower. Air is considered a fluid, so therefore the jet stream can be viewed as a river. According to Leonardo DA Vinci’s “Law of Continuity”, which says “A river of uniform depth will have a more rapid flow at the narrower section than at the wider”, the upper jet stream is faster than the lower. This is an amazing discovery on Zhukovsky; he had discovered how airplanes flew.