The Counterintuitive Physics of Turning a Bike

What Hacker News said

Cites jasode · 2018-01 · on “Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)”

>Do you remember the insights that were crucial in learning to ride a bike or drive? The author mentioned bicycles and inadvertently missed an opportunity to show another "unknown reality" that beautifully illustrates his point. Consider typical adults (not physicists) with 20+ years of bicycle riding. If you ask them, "how does a bicycle turn?" , they'd respond that "you just lean into the direction of the turn and it turns." But that's not the complete picture of what actually happens.[1] If you were to capture the bicyclists with a high-speed camera, you'd notice that there's always a micro movement of countersteering to make the bike momentarily lose its balance and "fall into" the turn.

Cites monkeynotes · 2018-04 · on “Uncontrollability of a bricycle (2014) [video]”

Really highlights how you have to throw a bike slightly into the opposite direction[0] to a turn in order to get it to turn. When she tries to do this in the zero-gravity mode the bike just rolls over in the opposite direction without being able to kick the front wheel into the turn. [0] [this video]

Cites zestyping · 2023-03 · on “Show HN: GPT-4 Reverse Turing Test”

Here's what it means to understand how something works. If you can accurately predict what _change_ you need to make to its workings in order to achieve a desired _change_ in the resulting behaviour, then you know how it works. The more reliably and precisely you can predict the impact of various changes, the better your understanding. I know how a bicycle works. I can prove that I have a very basic level of understanding, for example, by showing you that if I want the bicycle to go faster, I can pedal harder; if I want the bicycle to slow down, I can squeeze the brakes. I can prove a greater level of understanding by showing you that I can increase efficiency by increasing the tire pressure