Please Note the first unaided human flight instructional video will now appear here towards the end of October 2009. Until then please enjoy the following description of...

The Physics of Flight

In order for us to achieve unaided human flight there are two equally important questions that must be addressed. Firstly we must produce an alternate rationality that allows us to conceive of flight as a possibility. This involves the creative application of our knowledge of the physics of gravity with a view to producing an intellectual framework for flight. Our first task is to describe this framework by making reference to how contemporary scientific understandings of gravity and quantum forces might allow the human body to become airborne. The other aspect required for unaided human flight is a rigorous training program that can shape both the brain and the rest of the body in a way that might allow it to get off the ground for sustained periods of time. The first aspects of this training that will be documented in an up-coming instructional video involve practicing yoga and harmonic throat singing in specific ways.  It’s worth mentioning that while the possible range of techniques that might help us to get off the ground is infinite we must practice the techniques that we choose to focus on with a high degree of rigor if we are to have any hope of getting off the ground.

You might ask yourself at this point whether or not we seriously believe that humans, as a species, are capable of taking to the air with much the same ease as we currently walk around on the surface of this planet. As the discussion of unaided human flight develops we will see how it can be framed in a way that makes this question largely irrelevant. This framing involves seeing our intellectual investigation of the possibility of human flight and our engagement with the training that such a possibility demands as entirely pragmatic exercises, regardless of whether or not you believe that we as a species are capable of flight. In order to see the pursuit of unaided human flight in these terms a rigorous engagement with both the intellectual and physical aspects of flight training is imperative. With this in mind, before we get on to the question of why our attempts to fly might be beneficial for our development, we will offer a reading of the physics that might allow us to conceive of flight as an intellectual possibility.

One of the foundations of our understanding of the physics that will allow flight to occur lies in a basic fact of gravity. That is the fact that everything that has mass also has its own gravitational field. So while the gravity of the earth is proportionally much greater than the gravity of the human body, the body none the less exerts a gravitational pull on all the matter that surrounds it. So when you walk into a room everything in that room, from the walls, floor and ceiling to the books on the shelf, will bend imperceptibly toward you. Or to put it another way, just as the earth’s mass pulls us toward its surface, our own mass also tugs on the matter around us. This is important because it helps us to realize that despite the fact that the mass of the earth produces the force that we are most aware of on a day to day basis we are nonetheless part of an intricate web of gravitational forces that includes anything that has mass. From the stone that we might skim on ocean waves, to the sun that holds the earth in orbit or further on to the black hole at the centre of our galaxy, all these things have gravity.

Despite this fact gravity is actually known as the weak force. In fact gravity is many many orders of magnitude weaker than the other three fundamental forces of physics. While gravity’s weakness makes life difficult for physicists who are attempting to come up with formulas that are capable of describing all the fundamental forces it does seem like good news for prospective flyers.  However it is only good news if we consider theories that account for the weakness of gravity.

String theory is one such theory. It suggests that the smallest bits of matter are tiny strings vibrating in eleven dimensional space time. String theory then uses those dimensions to account for the weakness of gravity. So, as the theory goes, gravity is actually a much stronger force however a very large proportion of its total force is leaking into other dimensions. It is this process of leakage that is crucial in understanding the physics of flight. In order to train the body to fly we must first become aware of the movement of gravity into other dimensions through the strings that make up our bodies. This embodied understanding of the flow of gravity will then allow us to develop further techniques aimed at gaining control over the amount of gravity’s force that passes into unseen dimensions. This type of control involve modulating the body’s mass through multiple dimensions which has then net effect of reducing its mass in the three dimensions of space and one of time to which we are habitually tuned.

Our ability to tune in to the weird quantum effects of multiple dimensions is one that finds a somewhat surprising sympathizer in Richard Dawkins. In a lecture presented by him at a Ted conference Dawkins speculated on how video games might be used to train children in the perception of quantum scale phenomena. He describes how we are tuned to the “middle-world” where we don’t encounter the buckling of space time produced by objects with enormous gravity like black holes and nor do we encounter the quantum weirdness of very small scale phenomena. Dawkins then goes on to imagines a computer generated “world in which the strange goings on of quantum mechanics were enlarged by the computer’s make believe, so that they became familiar objects on the middle-world scale of the stream.” For Dawkins this tuning in to behavior of matter on the quantum scale might allow new ways of thinking that could help to overcome some of the impasses that face theoretical physicists.

While we think there are perhaps more effective ways of tuning to the quantum level and our goals go beyond scientific discovery Dawkins suggestion is one that we can apply to solving the problems of unaided human flight while we also open up all sorts of other possibilities creating across many dimensions.

For more relevant information on gravity and string theory see

 Why is Gravity So Weak .

and Brian Greene's documentary

The Elegant Universe

flight and yoga