Cyccommute remember just enough physics vocabulary from his school days to fake an imitation of understanding, but he forgot all the rules of how the words are put together. The result is a total clusterf***. He's like a kid who remembers + - × ÷ but forgot about order of operations. Here is a case of knowing 50% being worse than knowing nothing at all. At least if you know nothing then you know you know nothing. When you know just barely enough to cause you to falsely believe that you know, but in reality you actually don't know... this is just tragic... Combine that with false confidence... it's game over right there.
I'm not saying he's doing it intentionally. I know he genuinely believes he is right. There are many areas in life where conviction goes a long way. Unfortunately this isn't one of them. There's no real latitude for interpretation in this kind of grad school science. At first I thought he knew the concepts but was just applying vocabulary incorrectly. But at one point I brought up the velodrome example, and when he responded incorrectly I knew immediately that it was the other way around. He knew the vocabulary but didn't understand the concepts. The worst possible combination. Right there I figured he was probably beyond salvage. It's easy to teach A kids because they are stars. It's easy to teach F kids because they know nothing and you simply teach everything from scratch. But when you get to the C and D kids... that's what drives people to quit teaching. There is an insurmountable valley of ghoulish unmalleability here, it's soul crushing to watch let alone participate in.
That's my verdict. Sorry if I offended anyone.
I had a whole semi-insulting series of responses typed out but I’m not going to be as small and petty as you. Let’s stick to the original issue:
Look, I understand what you are trying to say about “converts any lateral force into perfectly straight down force as far as the bike is concerned” and that the forces are balanced. But just because a force is balanced by another force, doesn’t mean the force doesn’t exist. The whole “for every action (force) in nature there is an equal and opposite reaction” means that the force
has to be balanced. It it weren’t or if you exceed the force, the bike and rider fly off the corner.
Can you agree that if the bicycle and rider are riding straight down the road, that the bike and rider are experiencing the force of gravity? They aren’t moving up or down but they are still under the influence of the gravitational pull of the earth, right? Because of the way a tensioned spoked wheel is built, the rim right above the contact patch is being deflected upwards by the loading of the bicycle rider and weight, giving the rim a (very) slight flattening at the contact patch.
Now the rider goes into a corner. The friction on the tire keeps the tire from sliding off the corner and the centripetal force pulls the wheel around the corner. The bike leans over because of the lateral force on the wheel. Like riding in a straight line, the forces are balanced but the forces are still there.
At the contact patch, the slight flattening of the rim is now at an angle to the ground and turns into a slight bending of the rim upward. The bicycle wheel being a tensioned structure isn’t rigid like other wheels with rigid spokes (or rigid structure). In a rigid wheel, the tire does the deflection. To be clear, the bicycle tire also deflects some but the rim isn’t rigidly attached to the spokes and can this bend as well. The whole wheel doesn’t bend. Only a very small section at the contact patch will experience bending.
To be clear, this bending isn’t usually enough to cause the rim to permanently deform. If the spokes of the wheel are over tensioned and the wheel experiences enough force, it
could go into the sinusoidal wave form we call a “taco” but most of the time it doesn’t.
And where the hell did you bring up a velodrome example?