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published by
the Public Broadcasting Service and the WGBH Educational Foundation
This interactive tutorial examines the aerodynamic forces of lift and drag. Students explore the two principles that combine to produce lift: the Bernoulli Effect and Newton's Third Law. The tutorial discusses why wing shape alone cannot create lift. Airplanes stay aloft because the wing pushes air down; the corresponding reaction occurs as air pushes the wing up. This paired action/reaction, along with wing shape and airspeed, interact to produce flight.
This resource is part of the NOVA digital collection on space and flight.
9-12: 4F/H4. Whenever one thing exerts a force on another, an equal amount of force is exerted back on it.
10. Historical Perspectives
10B. Uniting the Heavens and Earth
9-12: 10B/H1. Isaac Newton, building on earlier descriptions of motion by Galileo, Kepler, and others, created a unified view of force and motion in which motion everywhere in the universe can be explained by the same few rules. Newton's system was based on the concepts of mass, force, and acceleration; his three laws of motion relating them; and a physical law stating that the force of gravity between any two objects in the universe depends only upon their masses and the distance between them.
9-12: 10B/H5. Although overtaken in the 1900s by Einstein's relativity theory, Newton's ideas persist and are widely used. Moreover, his influence has extended far beyond physics and astronomy, serving as a model for other sciences and even raising philosophical questions about free will and the organization of social systems.
11. Common Themes
11B. Models
6-8: 11B/M1. Models are often used to think about processes that happen too slowly, too quickly, or on too small a scale to observe directly. They are also used for processes that are too vast, too complex, or too dangerous to study.
<a href="https://psrc.aapt.org/items/detail.cfm?ID=11495">Public Broadcasting Service. NOVA: Lift and Drag. Arlington: Public Broadcasting Service, January 15, 2011.</a>
NOVA: Lift and Drag. (2011, January 15). Retrieved January 6, 2025, from Public Broadcasting Service: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/space/lift-drag.html
Public Broadcasting Service. NOVA: Lift and Drag. Arlington: Public Broadcasting Service, January 15, 2011. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/space/lift-drag.html (accessed 6 January 2025).
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