Downwind Faster Than the Wind by Veritasium: How Does it Work?
I recently watched Veritasium’s video on the Blackbird vehicle. A strange-looking thing that sort of resembles a wind turbine on a go-cart. To summarise it in case you haven’t seen the video yet, there is a cart with a propeller on it, and it’s travelling downwind. The wheels of the cart turn the propeller which creates thrust that pushes the cart along… And it can go faster than the speed of the wind.
Now if you find that hard to believe then you are not the only one, a UCLA physics professor has actually bet Veritasium aka Derek ten thousand US dollars that travelling downwind faster than the wind is not possible. There’s a contract and everything, and it was witnessed by Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Bill Nye and Sean Carrol, so some pretty big names in science there.
