They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but an animation, then, must be worth a million. Make that animation interactive, and… well, we don’t know how many words it is worth, but it is plenty! That’s the idea behind [Bartosz Ciechanowski’s] blog where he uses clever interactive animations to explain the surprisingly complex physics of riding a bicycle.
The first animation lets you view a rider from any angle and control the rider’s pose. Later ones show you how forces act on the rider and bicycle, starting with example wooden boxes and working back up to the original bike rider with force vectors visible. As you move the rider or the bike, the arrows show you the direction and magnitude of force.
You eventually graduate to close-ups of the tires, the handlebars, and the sprocket. These kinds of animations are to physics what an oscilloscope is to electronics. You don’t have to have a scope to understand electronics, but it sure does help.
Once you are done with the bike — and that’s going to take some time — click on “Archives” and see similar posts on mechanical watches, GPS, internal combustion engines, and more. Really great stuff.
There was a time when beautiful educational animations were very expensive to create. They are easier now, but we still don’t see them as often as we’d like for topics like Fourier transforms.
Support the originator by clicking the read the rest link below.
 Explained){kind=link}