Master of Science - 04/08/25

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Master of Science with host Professor James McCanny.
The good professor's career spans fifty years as a university teacher, scientist,
and engineer. Each week, he will explore the rapidly changing
world of science as many long held theories are crumbling
under the weight of new data. He will cover the

(00:23):
fields of geology, archaeology, meteorology, oceanography, space science, astronomy, cosmology,
biological evolution, virology, energy, mathematics, and war. So please welcome
the host of Master of Science, James McCanny.

Speaker 2 (00:51):
Good evening everybody. Tonight, I'm going to talk about the
physics of archery something this is one of my favorite topics.
I grew up with archery as a kid. I made
my own first bow out of a piece of hickory,
and I'll talk about my personal development in the world
of archery. But the discussion will be about the physics

(01:17):
of archery, of the arrow, flying of the bow, what
makes a bow work, etc. What are the physical properties
of a bow, and some of the little historical facts,
some of the fun facts that the archery has been
with mankind since the dawn of civilization. But first I

(01:37):
have to unfortunately take a little bit of this time
out of this show because right now we'll actually over
the past number of weeks there have been deep cuts
going into NASA, NASA personnel and it's okay, well, let

(01:58):
me just start in the beginning here. Uh, let's go
back to the beginning of NASA where it started, and
of course post World War two, the uh, the space
program got its start by bringing the German rocket scientists
headed by Warner von Braun. And you know, you see

(02:21):
the group, you know, the Operation paper Clip, which bringing
these agents into the US. But there were thousands of them,
not just a few. And you see a picture and
there might be seventy five people that you see in
a picture there with Warnervan Warner von Braun in front.
But no, it was thousands and thousands and thousands of agents.

(02:44):
And they basically were brought into the United States to
operate all kinds of things excuse me, and including the
intel agencies, which is uh, because the Germans had very
good intelligen in terms of finding out what the other
side is doing. So but back to the beginning of NASA.

(03:09):
So the whole idea of NASA was it was supposed
to be a Civilian space program. Now, let me discuss
a few other things that happened in about that same timeframe.
The one was the telecommunication system, the mob el, the
AT and T. These were basically agencies of the federal

(03:33):
government at first, and they developed the phone system there
where you have the old hand phone when I was
a kid, had this big, heavy duty plastic phone with
a dial on it and you'd pick up. And then
they got one that would hang on the wall. But

(03:55):
the rudimentary the early days of tell of course go
back into the early days of the nineteen hundreds. But
when it modernized is what I'm talking about. This is
post World War two. And there's a lot of technical
developments that occurred in World War Two as a part

(04:16):
of the war effort. Just there was you know, aviation
and rocketry of course, which I'm going to talk about here.
But the point is. The point is that when the
government put effort into developing a system, it was to
be used by business, by individuals. So the phone system

(04:40):
is a great example where they wanted distribution. Electricity is
another one. These were deemed as essential things for modernizing
American life. Electricity to the home, natural gas to the home,
replacing delivering oil or coal or fuel oil into the

(05:03):
homes and bring in a natural gas line so you
can heat the homes, et cetera. So these are all
public works. The highway system. When Eisenhower left office, he
initiated the Interstate Highway system, and one of the big
reasons was because they needed to potentially move troops around

(05:28):
the country. I mean, if somebody invaded on the East coast,
we might have to move a lot of troops and
equipment from the West coast over to the east coast.
And then the way the country was at the time,
you simply couldn't do it. It simply was impossible. And
one of the things they learned from World War Two
is that bridges were critical. So if you notice the

(05:49):
Interstate Highway system, if you have a bridge, there are
ramps that go around it, and so that if you
had if somebody blew up the bridge is the point.
If somebody blew up the bridge, you could get your
military equipment around it on the ground. And so the
whole highway system was made with system of ramps and

(06:10):
entrances which facilitate traffic movement. But the bigger reason was
to facilitate movement of military equipment around bridges that were
blown up by the enemy. That was the whole point. Okay,
So what does this have to do with NASA. Well,

(06:31):
what NASA should have done, and it really never was
because it was deemed that space was something that only
a few people could do and openly, with tens of
thousands of engineers and vast amounts of human ingenuity and
huge amounts of government money, could you go into space.

(06:53):
And of course the airline industry developed natively in the
United States and then around the world, where developments in aviation,
you know, going from propellers to the jet engine, all
the different advancements in aviation. A lot of it happened

(07:14):
during World War Two. But there again, the whole idea
was to commercialize this for public transportation. So when you
built airports all over the place, there was systems of
airport and then the FAA was put in charge of
the movement and of course the safety and all other
aspects of the airline industry to monitor them and to

(07:40):
license them, et cetera. Okay, But getting back to NASA,
the NASA went on this path of having specialized scientists
that would study outer space, that would seem to make sense,
seemed to make sense. And then the production of equipment.
So this was all scheduled, it was all monitored, it

(08:03):
was all organized, it was all overseen by central Command
at NASA. And so then of course the famous John F.
Kennedy promised to go to the Moon by the end
of the nineteen sixties. And what's very interesting there is
that his adversary, Richard Nixon, was president when finally they

(08:26):
rolled around to blasting off to try to go to
the Moon in the late nineteen sixties. Okay, but anyway,
the point is that NASA was never what it should
have been. What it should have been was a system
developing a system in which businesses and individuals and anybody

(08:50):
could go into space. But it was never deemed that.
It was always presented as this impossible thing that only
a few trained astron could go into space, and the
real situation was behind the scenes. This is the Tier
two space program that is presented to the public, when

(09:13):
in reality come along Richard Branson and the bird Routan
with Spaceship one and they go into space with winning
the on Sari X prize for ten million dollars. And
the point of that prize was to go into space
one week apart less than one week the same spacecraft

(09:38):
carrying three people. And so this had to be some
kind of reusable spacecraft. It was something deemed absolutely impossible.
And Bird Rautan comes out of his warehouse in the
Mojave Desert, designs and builds this glider little aircraft and

(10:01):
then completes it, and it was considered dangerous. Instead of
having three people and risk three lives, they allowed one
pilot and two bags of sand to take the place
of the other two passengers, just because it was deemed impossible.
But when they did that, you had the air Force

(10:21):
out there, you had all of the brass out there,
and immediately before they even got off the ground, the
FAA comes in and puts all levels of red tape
on top of them. For somebody like me that was
very much viewed NASA from very close up, from a

(10:45):
magnifying lens, very close up. Throughout my entire career, what
I realized that the NASA you see is not the
real NASA. There was space programs Tier one, what I
call Tirajuan or military space programs going on behind the scenes,
and so the NASA you see the entire purpose of

(11:08):
NASA was to keep you from going into space, to
make it look so difficult that only tens of thousands
of engineers and only dozens and dozens of aerospace corporations
that make billions of dollars off of this program, and
only NASA and only drain NASA astronauts could go into

(11:29):
space because it's so dangerous. You know, what I think
is funny is they're so worried about you going into
space because it's so dangerous, But they're not worried about
say a kid on a surfboard on the California coast
riding a wave. He could fall off and crack his
head white open, and NASA doesn't give a diddley darn.

(11:50):
It's not on their charts, it's not in the vista.
So they're not worried about you cracking your head white
open going into space. They're worried about you going into space.
And so that was the entire motivation. And if you
look back over sixty years of now probably close to
eighty years of NASA's existence and find that they really

(12:15):
they set goals and they did things, and there were
other great examples. For example, a private citizen his name
was Dennis I think was his first name, Tito, and
he was a wealthy businessman and he wanted to go
to the space station and NASA said, no way, sorry,
you can't go. You're you know. So he went over

(12:38):
to Russia. He paid the Russians, and he went through training,
and he goes up to the because it's the International
Space Station, it's supported by Russia and the United States.
So he goes up with the Russians and he goes
on the space station, and the whole time, nobody at
the US side of the space station even acknowledged that

(12:58):
he was there. His story is he came back and
he had said with the Russians drinking vodka on the
Russian side of the space program of the space station,
and there were some other people, for example John Denver.
A lot of people who don't know that he was

(13:19):
on the way to Russia to train to become an
astronaut and sing songs about going into space. That's where
he was going. If you listen to a lot of
his songs, they're talking about dancing across the mountains on
the Moon or going into space, and that's what he
wanted to do. But he met with an early demise.

(13:40):
And I'm not going to go down that rabbit hole
in this show, but the entire purpose of NASA was
to keep you from going into space. Okay, So that
gives you a little bit of history about NASA. And
my opinion is that NASA should be completely shut down

(14:02):
one hundred percent because if you are looking for an
agency that has not accomplished the goals that it should
have accomplished. I mean, this is the primary example. When
the twenty seventeen member back in twenty seventeen, there was
a shut down of the government when Trump's early first term,

(14:26):
and they asked all the agencies in the government to
only keep essential people, you know, so that the government
didn't completely collapse, and so people still got Social Security
checks and you know, necessary things, and so they had
to determine who was essential and non essential workers. NASA

(14:51):
had the highest percentage of non essential workers at around
ninety five percent, and I think the EPA was second
at around fifty percent of what they considered non essential.
So at any rate, the uh NASA had the by
far and away the highest percentage of non essential workers.

(15:12):
You have to wonder, what are all these people doing?
You know, pushing pencils around and sending emails, having meetings.
And I've been in corporations before where that's what happens.
You have this hierarchy of people that have meetings and
send emails and it's like, you know, nothing, they don't

(15:34):
they don't produce anything anyway, anything real, let's put it
that way. But anyway, so that that's an interesting note.
So the NASA really did not do its job of
what I consider it should have been, was to provide
a platform for people to go into lorth orbit. And

(15:56):
it's very interesting too that when they they went to
the Moon in the nineteen sixties and seventies, after that
they dismantled the entire space program, dismantled all of the internals,
destroyed all of the and lost, they say, all of

(16:18):
the footage, all of the design parameters, all of the
design work for those big rockets, the Saturn series of rockets,
the Saturn one to the Saturn five, the Saturn five
being the Moon launch rocket. They destroyed all the paperwork,
all the designs, everything was destroyed. There's not a shred

(16:38):
of information left about that. Okay, so that's another story.
But in my way of thinking, then NASA in that
respect in the part is about the part where they
should have provided a pathway to at least lower thority.

(17:00):
But my point was in talking about the Moon program,
is that they took anything apart, and they then had
the Space Shuttle program and then other rocket programs, and
for a long time depended on Russia to launch even
their military satellites, paying Russia's space program, but they never

(17:20):
ever left low Earth orbit. I've talked about this before
on the show. Now let me talk about the scientific part,
the scientists at NASA, and that's something that I happened
to know quite a bit about because I rubbed shoulders
with those people for decades, literally decades when I was

(17:44):
at Cornell. It's nineteen seventy nine to eighty one. I
was literally in the same room with these people, realizing
that they had no idea what they were doing. Arrogant, oh,
horrifically arrogant. It was disgusting, absolutely disgusting, how arrogant these
people were, haughty, and they just you know, we'd be

(18:07):
in meetings where they would there would be new data
coming in from outer space and somebody would they say, well,
what does this mean? And somebody would flip out an
idea and then that became the accepted Somebody would publish
a paper and that would be the accepted explanation for
whatever it was. And it was like, these people have

(18:30):
no idea what they're doing. They're just they're writing their
own ticket and what they did. Then, when I was
at Cornell, data was wide open. You could go in,
I could see it all. I could see the data
on a daily basis that came from spacecraft, et cetera.
And that's when I got in trouble because I was

(18:51):
using their spacecraft data to disprove their theories. I was
being published in peer reviewed astrophysics journals and oh that's
another story. I'm not going to go down that rabbit
hole today. But being around these scientists, I realized that
they were really stupid. They had no clue what was
going on. They were very arrogant, and they developed a monopoly. Now,

(19:15):
when I was at Cornell, they were independent scientists. I
won't name them off, but they were very very good scientists,
and they basically got squeezed out to the point they
couldn't get data, they couldn't publish in the journals, and
so they left. They went to other places. Some maintained
their profession, some went into other fields, but they all

(19:37):
went the way of the dinosaur. So basically, the government
supported scientists gained the monopoly by excluding other people, by
using peer review to squeeze out other people. They couldn't publish,
they couldn't get funding, they couldn't get data, and then
they have the nerve to say, we have all this data.

(19:58):
You don't have any data. Therefore we're smart, you're dumb.
The old Danny DeVito thing. What's that movie that Danny
DeVito is in. I'm big, You're small, I'm smart, You're dumb.
That's NASA's opinion of everybody else. And they got away
with it, And for fifty years they have gotten away
with basically creating a monopoly with government funded basically through

(20:23):
government funded science through NASA. So and the problem is
everything they've done is basically wrong, backwards and out of date.
Let me give you an example. When I was it
was nineteen ninety one, let me see, No, it's closer

(20:45):
to let me see ninety four, nineteen ninety four, time
frame ninety five. Somewhere in that timeframe, I was teaching
astronomy at the university level, and into my office at
the school came these textbook salesmen. In that particular year,
all of the textbook companies converted to a new updated

(21:10):
astronomy textbook. So I literally had I counted twenty one
salesman in my office, and these were astronomy textbooks at
all different levels, from beginner, you know, kids that would
be studying astronomy as an elective. Then there were more advanced,
and then more advanced, and then advanced to the point
where these were astronomy majors or physics majors or something.

(21:34):
And so I thought, you know, and they were offering
me free copies of these books textbooks. I said, okay, well,
so I took one of everyone, and I ended up
with twenty one textbooks university level astronomy textbooks, and so
I took them into my classes, and part of my
class astronomy classes, everybody had to do a term paper,

(22:00):
had to do a term paper. I said, okay, so
here's what I want you to do. I want you
to form little groups and pick a subject like galaxies
or venus the planet, or solar fusion or pickier topic,
and then go through all twenty one of these textbooks
and see what they say and then write a report
on it. So they did, and it came back that

(22:21):
all the textbooks were pretty much consistent. But what we
noticed is that the authors of one textbook would be
editors of another one, and so it was like this
little clubhouse where these scientists were mainly at NASA or
universities related that got funding from NASA or through a
National Science Foundation or federal money, were basically corroborating their stories,

(22:46):
so that these textbooks all said the same things, but
they had a lot of really incorrect information, but because
of the corroboration, it made it look like this was
really good information that they were to to students. Okay,
so at any rate, I did a video professionally. The
school was handing out money for professors to instructors to

(23:11):
do videos, and so I did a video and it
was called the Astronomy for the nineties. Was professionally produced.
And those are back in the days when they shot
it on film, actual film camera and then edit it,
you know, cutting the film and putting it together, and
so that actually is available on my web page. But

(23:34):
the point of this discussion is that the textbooks today
say the same thing as they did fifty years ago. Okay,
I want to cut this short, but there's a couple
other points I want to make. One is that NASA
has about financially about ninety five overhead, which leaves about

(23:54):
five percent of the money that goes for actual work
to be done. What this does, it leaves the vacuum
and that causes a number of problems because you have
to get these scientists out of there because they're just
going to do the same thing over and over and
over again until they finally retire and go golf and
the desert out in Arizona. So you got to get

(24:17):
rid of them. But we have all of this equipment
that was built, and this is the positive side of
NASA's You have all of these amazing engineers who build this.
The unsung heroes at NASA are the people that build
these amazing spacecraft and there you know the amazing things

(24:39):
that they do, and who gets the credit for it
the space scientists. Also, I want to point out that
in nineteen ninety one, NASA was taken over by basically
intelligence agencies, the CIA, and there was a very big
reason for that. I've talked about that before. I want

(24:59):
to mention, and the good example of complete failure is
the Boeing Starliner, this capsule that went up to the
space station and was working so poorly that they just
jettisoned it. And they had those two astronauts. They weren't
even astronauts, they were inspectors that were supposed to be

(25:19):
there one week and come back, were there for nine
months with no ability to go get them. But at
any rate, the biggest issue here is that the lack
of public confidence in NASA and in science in general
that comes out of the government, whether it's in pharmaceuticals,

(25:42):
whether it's in a plethoria of different regions, whether it's
the Environmental Pollution Agency that's what I call the EPA,
but especially NASA. This leaves the lack of trust, this
vacuum of trust that the publics has opened the barn
doors wide open for every nutcase and crack and want

(26:07):
to be and on the planet, people with no scientific
ability at all, no scientific knowledge, never have taken physics
courses or never. That just opens the door for these
people to jump on the YouTube channels and say anything
and everything. And that's why you find the media, the

(26:30):
social media channels filled with complete garbage, and how do
you sort out the truth? People, over the years and
decades have become reliant on what I do. If you
look at my history, going back with talk radio, with
being guests on radio shows, when people wanted real answers,

(26:52):
they would come to me, including other countries. I've been
on Japanese primetime TV, I've been on Russian primetime TV,
and I've been on History Channel specials. But when people
want real answers with real information, they tend to come
to me, and they don't. When Russia wanted somebody to
explain details about astrophysics in Russia, they came to me,

(27:16):
not the NASA. Same way in Japan they came to me.
They flew to the United States to interview me. In fact,
you can see that entire interview on a CD. That's
a DVD that's on my web page. Okay, but at anyway,
my point is that the lack, this vacuum of trust
in government supported science has opened the door for every

(27:41):
quack wanna be in Charlatan to fill the social media
pages with complete disinformation. And this is what's going out
two kids. Then you have pages that supposedly are something
like say Wikipedia, which is supposedly an authority dative page,

(28:01):
but it's complete, completely filled with garbage, especially when it
comes to science. It repeats the dogmatic standard concepts that
they're trying to push on you of the public, which
are completely bogus. So anyway, it has left the Western world,
which is supposedly the most advanced culture ever known to man,

(28:25):
not really. The United States is fortieth in science and
mathematics in the world. Imagine that. And the reason, one
of the big reasons is we have this vacuum at
the top of the food chain in education. Okay, so
I'm going to cut off there. But by removing NASA,

(28:47):
not only have we not gotten fifty or sixty years
of real results out of them, it leaves us with
nothing to look at today as absolute disaster. And this
is so that a few people could be king of
the hill and developed monopolies within these organizations on government

(29:07):
funded fund government money, government funding. Okay, So I really
don't like wasting time on this show talking about those
kinds of things, but it's actually necessary. It's something that anyway,
I'm now moving on to the topic I really want
to talk about, and that is the physics of archery,

(29:29):
and so my own personal involvement in archery was from
when I was a little kid. I had a fascination
with archery, and we were not destitute, but we really
didn't have any extra money to buy things like archery equipment,

(29:50):
and so I ended up making my own. And this
is something that there were books available, and actually the
way that those books were available is there were some people.
When they took the arms away after the Civil War
in the South, the people went out and made archery

(30:11):
equipment so they could hunt, and so that's where archery
was revived in a sense. But anyway, my dad bought
me a piece of hickory. There's a local company that
made carts for industry, or carts, meaning you put products
on them and move them around a factory floor, and

(30:31):
one of the essential parts of their carts that they
made was from hickory pieces of hickory. And so anyway,
my dad went out there and got a piece of hickory,
brought it home, and I took a rasp file and
it took me about all summer to whittle away on
that and make it into the correct shape and everything.

(30:52):
So I made my own first bow and then made
the string and learned how to use this my own arrows,
and I got very good with it. I got to
be quite accurate. I had a friend whose dad was
better off, and he had very nice bows, but I
was better with my bow than he was with his

(31:14):
commercially produced bow. But at any rate, eventually I did
get a bow for Christmas. It was a forty pound
Bear Cub. Anybody an archery would know this bow. It's
a recurved bow made by Fred Bear's company, Bear Archery,

(31:35):
now the Bear Archery bows. There was a patent actually
that Fred Bear had made, and that was a very
interesting design of a bow where you take laminates. You
take a piece of or two pieces of maple, very
straight grained maple, and on the outside you put laminates
of fiberglass on the front and back. And so what

(31:58):
you did is you separated those pieces of fiberglass with
basically an inert material, which was wood, and then they
covered this with a with like a eurethane or like
a varnished type of sealant and created these amazing recurved bows.
And so that style of bow is still produced today.

(32:21):
And so that was my very first commercial bow, was
a Bear it was the cub model, which is kind
of like the lower end recurve bow, and then I
used that for many years. And when I was a kid,
I lived in a small town, so literally i'd walk
to the edge of town and with my friends and

(32:41):
we'd go out. We would walk all day out in
the countryside and then come back at night and just
constantly shooting. So I mean, I got very good at this.
Tell a little story a little bit later about splitting
arrows and anyway, but I want to talk about the
physics of archery equipment. So some of the essentials, if

(33:03):
you go back, you have the mid Eastern bows, which
were made out of horn. They lived in a very
dry climate, and so they had the horns of animals,
literally the horns of animals, and they would split them
and they would boil them, and then they would get
glue that came from the hoofs of horses, and then sinew,

(33:25):
which was the very fibrous material in tendons of animals,
and they would wrap these and they created a bow,
a recurved bow that was short and with very high
velocity and small arrows, and so these were very effective,
and of course all of archery throughout history were used

(33:45):
for warfare. You know, going back to the English longbow
that came from the Celts. My ancestors developed the very
first long bows which they used and then were developed
further by the English, and that kept the English going
for a period of five hundred years. In fact, Benjamin Franklin,

(34:07):
one of the founding fathers of the United States, recommend it.
It was his desire that the Continental Army after the Revolution,
after the English leaving, he wanted archery bows to be
the standard military issue for the Continental Army. And the

(34:30):
reason is because cold or wet or rain or snow
or dry or whatever conditions you have, the archery bow
worked very well. It was light, it could be handled easily,
It had very little training to get a guy up
to speed, and it was very effective even over much

(34:50):
greater distances than the musket. But of course the call
was for using powdered unpowder in some kind of arm
and so the original Continental Army then used muskets, and
of course they didn't realize the original muskets did not

(35:12):
have rifling in the barrel to make the ball spin
as it came out, and that's why they were very
They were not very accurate over maybe twenty or thirty
yards because the ball would be flying around in different directions.
So the and I believe the rifling came during the
Civil War, that was maybe one of the innovations. But

(35:34):
at any rate, Benjamin Flying Franklin wanted archery in archers
because also rapid fire with a bow, say you had
a hundred pound bow, you could have a range of
about maybe two hundred yards, which is much better than
a musket. To read load a musket, you have to

(35:57):
be you have to be moving, you have to be
moving constantly and pouring the powder, and if it's raining
or missing, it doesn't work. So really a musket is
a very very poor armament, and an archery equipment is
much better. Archery equipment you can fire. A good archer

(36:19):
can fire twelve shots per minute. You could never do
that in a million years with a musket. So it
would be deemed a much better weapon in warfare. But
let me get back to the physics of archery equipment. Now,
a bow, of course bends, and so you have the

(36:41):
front side of the bow and you have the belly
side of the bow, that's the side that's towards the person.
And so what does a bow do When it bends,
the far side of the bow stretches and the belly
side of the bow compresses, So you need a material
but on the front side of the boat stretches and

(37:02):
the backside of the boat compresses and has compressive strengthen
when it springs back. It has to be a material
that has natural resilience in it, so you can do
this many times, and so there are materials. For example,
the yew tree is one of the better trees for
doing this. Where you take and the outside of the

(37:25):
yew tree is the part that stretches, and the inner
hard part of the u tree is the part that compresses.
And so the English war bows, the ones that actually
used in battle, were typically made from you. But you
didn't grow in England. It grew in the Pyrenees Mountains.

(37:45):
The best you came from the Pyrenees Mountains between Spain
and France. So England actually shipped their bowyers, that's the
term name for the person that makes the boats, ship
their boyers to the Pyrenees Mountains in in Spain to
make archery equipment and then they shipped back to England. However,

(38:06):
the commoner's bows because archery was required. It was a
required training for everybody in England, and I'll get into
that in a minute. But for the commoners, they didn't
have u which was more expensive and more exotic material
not prevalent in England. So what they used, I discovered

(38:30):
was red elm, and so I had an archery company
in the mid nineteen nineties in which I started out
making replica English archery equipment, including the armor piercing tips,
the Bodkin points. They are called whistlers, or they put
a little hole in the front of the arrow, so

(38:52):
when they were coming in, they would make this whistling
noise which would scare the horses of the opposing army
and caused them to scatter, And it was one of
the techniques they used to assault their enemies. But at
any rate, I'll talk about the physics of arrows flying

(39:15):
in a minute here, But the point is that the
red elm. There's certain varieties of red elm that are
used for construction. They make bridges out of them, supports,
and the reason is because it flexes and it returns,
it has a good memory. It's called memory. In other words,
when you flex it is it going to return to

(39:37):
the exact same shape. And by the way, the hickory
that I used, that was sometimes believed to be an
okay bow, but it's really not because it does not
have a good memory. It with time, it eventually bends.
And I still have that bow, by the way, it's
something that I kept. At any rate, you is very

(40:02):
good about returning, and you can also build a very
strong boat. Now, the typical archery bow today, if you
were to use a long bow or a recurve bow.
And I'm not going to talk about the the archery equipment,
the modern archery equipment, compound bows because that's I'll speak
a little bit about aero velocity. I'll talk about those

(40:23):
a little bit. But they shoot a very light arrow,
very fast, and they're used a lot for hunting today
and target practice. But I grew up with long bows
and recurve bows. But at any rate, let me go
back to Old England. And it's very interesting that some

(40:44):
of our expressions today come from Old English archery. And
I used to have a whole litany of these. I
just can remember a few even of them. Now. One
was called the first string. Now first string, you hear
that today you think that's a sporting team with the

(41:05):
five best guys in basketball, that's your first string, or
there's eleven guys in football, that's your first string, and
so they're the best players. So those are the best ones.
You put them out there so you win the game.
But in archery, your first string was your best string

(41:26):
that you had in your because you the broken strings
were something that were common back in the days of
medieval archery, so when you went into battle, you wanted
to use your first string. So that's where the term
comes from. And to hit the mark is another expression

(41:47):
where you're shooting your bow and you're trying to hit
a target. Now, this is interesting part of cultural development
in England is the reason they put the sheriffs out
in all the communities. Remember robin Hood and the sheriff
of Nottingham. Well, the reason they put the king put

(42:08):
the sheriffs out there is because they needed a m
They needed a militia. Okay, they needed a militia to
defend the country if they were attacked because it was
not uncommon for the French to come across the English
Channel or other entities to come across the English Channel

(42:32):
and attack them, so they needed a defense that they
could organize quickly and mount a defense, or they would
go the other way. They sometimes they would go across
the English Channel and attacked excuse me, attack the French.
But back to the part about the sheriffs distributed throughout

(42:55):
the country side of England. Their job was to maintain
law order, of course, and the other thing was to
control archery, because the king knew very well that if
the populace got rowdy at one point or wanted a revolution,
that the armed guard that they have at the castle

(43:17):
could not possibly maintain law and order with these well
trained peasants with archery equipment. So on Sunday, the Sunday
would roll around and they had mandatory shooting and they
would have out in the countryside what they called butts.
These were piles of dirt. It was just a pile
of dirt and they developed it. Doubtly was a sport.

(43:41):
Modern sport has evolved from this called clout shooting, where
you shoot and try and get the closest to basically
a target out in the middle of a field. And
so these commoners would go out there and the wives
would bring out the food and they'd have a big picnic,
and the share would bring out all the archery equipment

(44:01):
and they would have a practice, and then at the
end of the day the sheriff would gather up all
the archery equipment and take it back and put it away.
But then you had people like Robin Hood who lived
out in the woods with his archery equipment, with his
merry band of outlaws. And supposedly the story is robbing
from the rich and giving to the poor, so that's

(44:24):
why the poor loved him. Very famous movie I'm one
of my favorite movies is the Kevin Costner movie Robin Hood.
But anyway, the point is that this was part of
culture archery and the English developed it. They carried it

(44:44):
also on their ships. When the English ruled the oceans
for long periods of time, they had archers on the
boats also, And what they would do is they'd get
up in the rigging and when they came close to
another boat to board the boat, the archers would be
up there clearing the deck of the other ship. So

(45:05):
there wasn't anybody there to oppose the troops of the
English when they left their ship and mounted the other ship.
And that kept them in rulers of the sea for
five hundred years. Okay, So anyway back to the physics
of archery equipment. So you have this material that's flexible.

(45:26):
It stretches on one side and it compresses on the other,
and that is one of the major developments in archery
was from Fred Bhaer realizing this design where you take
fiberglass on the front side, fiberglass vaten on the backside,
and fiberglass compresses and it stretches. I want to mention

(45:48):
that I had an archery company throughout the nineteen nineties
and as I said, I was doing creating replica old
English lawn bows with all original equipment. So I had
a woman who made the flax string. She wound it
from the linen. It's from the flax plant, and that's

(46:12):
what I made my bow strings out of. And also
the arrows. I made the bows from various materials, but
primarily from red elm, a very excellent bowl material. You
have to get the right kind of red elm. And
then the arrows were made out of material from southern

(46:33):
yellow poplar, a very tall, straight tree, very firm grain
and very easily worked in for arrows. And that's what
the English used as a tree like that also, and
so also I had with the sets, and I was
selling this actually eventually as artwork, and I was in

(46:54):
art shows. If you're familiar with the duck stamps in
the north Midwest states, there is, for example, the Minnesota
the Wisconsin duck stamps, and these artists create a drawing,
a beautiful painting of a duck or a goose or whatever,
and they're trying to have their drawing or their painting,

(47:14):
beautiful paintings on the license for the stamp, the duck
stamp that would go for that next year hunting season.
My artwork got to the point with the archery equipment
where I was in competition in these art shows with
these same artists like Terry Redlin or others, if you're

(47:35):
familiar with that form of artwork. And so that's how
realistic my archery equipment was. Okay, So now let's talk
about arrows in velocity, of arrows in distance, etc. Going back,
as an example, the English longbow would have could have

(47:57):
a drawwaight up to say one hundred and seventy five pounds.
Now the average person today would be comfortable with a
thirty to fifty pound bow. Once you get over that
gets a little bit difficult. And that's why the popularity
of the compound bows with the pulleys and the strings

(48:18):
and where you pull it back and it gets easier
to pull when you bring it back, and then you
can hold it longer, et cetera. And they have sights
on them, et cetera. But okay, let's look at arrow's speed.
A typical arrow velocity from a long bow. This would
be from say one hundred and seventy five pound bow.

(48:39):
And by the way, the archers, because they started out
when they were young shooting these bows and heavier and
heavier bows, their bodies became contorted because of the tremendous
strain these bows would put on their body. And so
when they look at the remains of people, they can say, well,

(49:00):
this person was an archer because of the way their
bodies were distorted because of shooting the bows. But in
terms of velocity, the velocities were fairly low by modern standards,
maybe one hundred I'll just use a number, one hundred
and eighty feet per second. And by modern standards, a
modern archery bow of of the compound bows with the

(49:25):
pulleys et cetera, would be maybe four hundred feet per second,
literally more than double that. But they shoot a very
light arrow and they have a lot of wind resistance,
so they don't necessarily go that far. The situation with
the long bow was that they shot an extremely heavy

(49:45):
arrow and it was low velocity. So wind resistance goes
as the velocity squared. So the slower the arrow, the
less wind velocity, the less resistance there is for this
air moving through the air. And so a one hundred
and seventy five pound bow with a twenty eight inch

(50:06):
arrow released at a forty five degree angle, that's the
optimal angle for it projectel under the force of gravity
for the maximum distance at one hundred and eighty Check
it out if you want the calculators online. One hundred
and eighty feet per second shot at a forty five
degree angle and with very little wind resistance because it's

(50:29):
heavy and slow, would be it would go about one
thousand feet or about three hundred yards. That's a long distance.
And so what they would do is there was a
famous battle at Agincourt in northern France where the English
came across and they actually defeated the French in a

(50:52):
single battle, but with five hundred archers against ten thousand
French knights. And they did this because the archers could
shoot twelve rounds a minute. You have five hundred archers,
so let's say ten rounds a minute, So that's five
thousand rounds in a minute coming in. And what happens

(51:15):
as the arrow goes up, of course, it loses velocity
and the energy is stored in what we call potential energy.
But as it falls down it regains that velocity. So
it's almost like shooting at point blank range. And on
the tip of these they were called Bodkin points. It's
just a long pin basically a hard steel and with

(51:38):
the very small cross section actually like not perfectly pointed,
but a little flat point on the end. And the
amount of pressure and momentum coming in with that heavy
arrow is enough to penetrate armor. Okay, So the point
is the physics of an arrow flying a heavy arrow

(51:59):
at one hundred eighty feet per second shot at a
forty five degree angle could go about three hundred yards
about one thousand feet. And if you could rain down
these arrows on the opposing enemy, five hundred arrows coming
in every about, like I say, ten rounds per minute.

(52:21):
That's every six seconds they were shooting, and so that's
five thousand arrows in one minute. And they could keep
this up for fifteen or twenty minutes. And this just
pounding of arrows coming in on the opposing force was
something they just couldn't manage. And so the archery equipment

(52:44):
was incredibly effective. The modern recurve bows don't have quite
the power. But say you take a fifty pound bow
recurve bow, and now the recurve is very interesting, and
I want to talk about the physics of a recurved bow.

(53:06):
These were developed mainly the English never developed the recurve bow,
but in the mid Eastern societies where they in the
Eastern societies they developed a recurve bow. And the principle
there is that as the tension in the string increases
and the string is shortened as the recurves roll up,

(53:30):
the string becomes shorter, and so the frequency of the string,
the natural resonant frequency of the string, the frequency becomes
much higher. In other words, it's moving with a higher velocity.
So as the string is stretched as the recurve, you
pull it back and as the string wraps around the
recurve tips, the frequency becomes higher and the velocity becomes higher,

(53:53):
so it works more efficiently given the same basically the
same set of materials as a long bow. You get
additional velocity out of a recurved bow. Now we want
to talk about energy and momentum. Now, these are physical
properties of anything that's moving. So energy is one half

(54:15):
Envy square that's kinetic energy, and momentum is MV. So
it's very interesting that if you plot from an archery
from an archery bow, if you measure the velocity, and
you'll calculate the energy of a bow over its range
from a velocity given different mass arrows, etc. And the

(54:39):
question is what's the most effective erow mass for your bow?
And you will see an energy curve that's kind of
peaked in the middle, and so then some people pick
their arrow mass based on that, but it's actually incorrect.
And this is for somebody to say, for example, that
wants to use an arrow for hunting, and the real

(55:02):
parameter that they want to use is momentum MV. And
what you find is that with a typical longbow that
as you go to heavier and heavier, more massive arrows,
it's linear and continues to increase, So the effectiveness of
a bow is really measured in terms of momentum. And

(55:24):
I see this mistake all the time. I'm reading somebody's article.
They're talking about effectiveness of arrows or for target practice, etc.
And it turns out that the more massive arrow has
more momentum. And that's the key factor in understanding arrow
of performance. If you want a target arrow, then you

(55:47):
may want to narrow that moved faster with less mass.
I want to talk about an archery company that I said.
I had an archery company in the mid nineties and
I was making wooden replica archery equipment. I also had
the line of Native American archery equipment that I made
along with that. But I took the bow design to

(56:10):
a group of people that are on the West coast.
They were making military equipment. They were actually making parts
for military aircraft with carbon fiber, and so I approached
them and they had working for them some of the
people who had made the very first golf shafts out
of carbon fiber. So we collaborated and I brought my

(56:30):
bow designs and we made the first carbon fiber first
carbon fiber bows archery bows, and I actually marketed those
for a short period of time until I'll tell you
why the company finally shut down. But these bows were
amazing as a long bow. They had super high velocity,

(56:53):
and I was shooting very lightweight carbon arrows, so they
had velocities that were reaching the velocity of a compound bow.
And so then I went to the next set of designs,
and one day I got a call from the company.
We're moving into another design, a short, a short fiber

(57:13):
carbon fiber bow, and it was a takedown bow, so
it could be broken down into a couple of three pieces,
very short distance, a very short measurement, and that they
shoot these little fine arrow mid arrows, and so at
any rate. One day the military was in the company
inspecting as they do, of course, and they said, what's this,

(57:37):
and said, this mad scientist named McKenney has, as you know,
this product line. He's making these this archery equipment. So
the military examined it and they said, this stuff is
too outstanding. We cannot let him make it anymore. So
they shut me down. That's why I had to stop

(57:59):
making thatquipment, because it was in terms of archery equipment,
it was small compact and amazingly, in the terms of
military terms, incredibly dangerous. I want to tell a little
story about using physics now. The woman who made the
linen string for me, of the linen fiber that I

(58:21):
used on my bow strings. We would go to these
events and she was participant in some of these events
with showcasing artistic They were artists, and so anyway, one
morning I was walking out in this field out in

(58:42):
the Midwest, outside of this place where the artwork was
being displayed, and she said, you know, Robin Hood was
so good. He could split an arrow. And I said,
I can split an arrow, but the arrow can be
flying through the error and I can hit it. And
she said, no, I don't believe that nobody could do that.
So I said, okay, well shoot your arrow, because she

(59:04):
had one of my longbows, and I said, well, shoot
your arrow and I will hit it. So she takes
her bow and shoots an arrow into the sky and
I wait a minute, and I take my bow and
I shoot and I hit it. I hit her arrow
in the air, and she was like screaming. I couldn't
believe that I was better than Robinhood, she said, But

(59:25):
at any rate, here's the trick, and it's a physics
experiment that if you have let's say, a little cannon
with a ball in it over here, and it points
directly at an object here, and you send the ball
out of the cannon here. At the same time you
drop the ball here, they're going to meet because they

(59:45):
fall at the same rate. They're under the same force
of gravity. So that's one of the tricks. And so
with the heavier arrow from the warbos, from the medieval warbos,
they act exactly like a projectile in a laboratory. And
so with a little bit of skill, a little bit
of luck, and a little bit of knowledge, I was
able to shoot an arrow out of the air. So

(01:00:08):
with that I'll leave you, and I hope you find
this interesting.

Speaker 1 (01:00:16):
This has been Master of Science with host James mccanney.
Join us each week as James will delve into historical
figures such as Nicola Tesla, Albert Einstein, and the great
mathematicians as we explore the history of man, Earth in
our universe as you've never seen it before. Tuesday, seven
pm Eastern right here on the Bold Brave TV Network

(01:00:40):
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