[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.

[hughw]

Cmon, man

[salty_biscuits]

You can write out the equations of motion for a bicycle that will very accurately predict the dynamics. You can put these equations into a numerical simulation and predict motion very accurately. You can change the parameters of the model and do simulations with high confidence. Just because there isn't some neat little equation that says exactly what each parameter change is going to do (without doing the simulation) doesn't mean that we don't understand bicycle physics. It's a silly line of reasoning. Those articles are hyperbolic.

[ddalex]

You are contradicting yourself:

> You can write out the equations of motion for a bicycle

> there isn't some neat little equation that says exactly what each parameter change is going to do

I mean, if you have the equations you can see what each parameter is doing !

[jerf]

Something smaller than may help you grasp this idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nW3nJhBHL0

There are things we can characterize to any desired degree of accuracy but that e don't get cute little equations out of... and some of those things are so simple they've been staring you in the face since middle school and you just didn't ever notice their absence from your formula sheets.

This is not the exact same situation being described but it's a similar thing. Being able to put a complex system into a computer and arbitrarily manipulate it still doesn't mean we can extract some simple explanation.

On the other end of the scale, see all the AIs coming out. They're 100% computer artifacts with theoretically no mystery in them whatsoever... but they're just tables of billions of opaque numbers and doing anything with the numbers beyond just running them is amazingly difficult.

[salty_biscuits]

Algebraic versus differential if that wasn't clear

[babypuncher]

I think their point still stands, even if "we don't know how bikes work" is a flowery exaggeration.

[IshKebab]

But then we don't know how anything works...

[DonHopkins]

Yet we still have Insane Clown Posse refrigerator magnets.

https://www.insaneclownpossemerch.com/collections/insane-clo...

Scientists Try To Teach ICP Fans How Fucking Magnets Work

https://metalinjection.net/av/scientists-teach-icp-fans-fuck...

[babypuncher]

But their point is we don't need a 100% complete scientific understanding of something in order to engineer it into something cool or useful.

[IshKebab]

That is true, but it's still incorrect to say we don't understand how bicycles work.