
The stability of the bicycle (2006) - trymas
http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/magazine/physicstoday/article/59/9/10.1063/1.2364246
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gballan
For a modern / control systems perspective, check out [pdf]:

[http://www.control.lth.se/media/Staff/KarlJohanAstrom/Lectur...](http://www.control.lth.se/media/Staff/KarlJohanAstrom/Lectures/BikeTalkKTH2006.pdf)

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dcminter
David E. H. Jones is a.k.a Daedalus, the crackpot inventor of the eponymous
column in New Scientist and Nature in years gone by.

To those of you who are fans of Randall Munroe's What-If I heartily recommend
the out of print classics The Inventions of Daedalus and its sequel The
Further Inventions of Daedalus which are in a losely similar vein.

Last I heard (a few years ago) he was still alive and a documentary largely
about his ingenious "perpetual motion" machines was made. I hope he's still
hearty but fear he may have passed.

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Isamu
> It seems a lot of tortuous effort to produce in the end a machine of
> absolutely no utility whatsoever, but that sets me firmly in the mainstream
> of modern technology. At least I will have no intention of foisting the
> product onto a long-suffering public in the name of progress.

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ramanan
Bicycles are surprisingly stable as long as they are able to maintain some
momentum.

minutephysics had a great video about this too:

How Do Bikes Stay Up?:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZAc5t2lkvo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZAc5t2lkvo)

~~~
atso
Well, both the article and the video say that there is more than one factor
for reaching stability, not only momentum.

I think that this is the current status, knowing that the bike does not fall
by the simultaneous combination of several factors. When analyzing the problem
mathematically, it can be found that there are additional stability factors
that do not even have direct physical meaning.

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keville
This article was originally printed in 1970.

[http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~fajans/Teaching/MoreBikeFiles/...](http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~fajans/Teaching/MoreBikeFiles/JonesBikeBW.pdf)

