Wikipedia Cover Up: No One Can Explain Why Planes Stay in the Air

When I seek to put up a reference to the New Theory of Flight on the Wikipedia article on Lift (force), busy Wikipedians promptly censor this information. My discussion with Wikipedia can be followed at Talk: Lift force: New Theory of Flight. This is a long story which goes back to 2012: Mathematical Secret of Flight 6: Wikipedia Cover Up with related posts reporting on my interchange with John D. Anderson in 2012 on theories of flight.

What is covered up is what was reported in New York Times in 2003 STAYING ALOFT; What Does Keep Them Up There? and repeated in Scientific American as late as 2020: No One Can Explain Why Planes Stay in the Air.  

The Wikipedia article on Lift force is a lengthy illustration of what fluid dynamics expert John D. Anderson told NYT: There is no simple one-liner answer to this, rephrased in the headlines.The Wikipedia article thus presents a collection of theories for lift which are all shown to be incorrect, and in particular no theory claimed to be correct. This what also NASA does when presenting 3 theories of lift together with arguments showing that they are incorrect, but no theory claimed to be correct, as if removing all incorrect theories somehow would reveal a correct one. 

All of this is very remarkable: Engineers are building airplanes for mass transportation of people, but there is no commonly accepted science explaining what keeps planes in the air. Should Wikipedia present this fact or cover up what is revealed in popular science/press?

The New Theory of Flight gives a new explanation of the generation of large lift at small drag of a wing based on computing turbulent solutions to the Euler/Navier-Stokes equations with a slip boundary condition on the wing surface as crucial new element with double role of making the turbulent flow around the wing computable (by not asking for impossible resolution of a thin boundary layer) and explaining the generation of lift from low pressure on the upper wing surface from potential flow and lack of high pressure at the trailing edge by 3d rotational slip separation. The New Theory is presented in detail on The Secret of Flight and is backed by massive computation and detailed mathematical analysis featured on AIAA High Lift Prediction Workshops.

Question: Why does Wikipedian Mr Swordfish censor any reference to the well documented New Theory of Flight in a Wikipedia article on Lift (force), which is a lengthy for the public most confusing account of lift theories all shown/known to be incorrect? Who is behind Mr Swordfish with name and scientific credentials with whom I can have a scientific discussion? I pose these questions on the Talk page and ask for answers.

Answer from Mr Swordfish on Talk:

The very simple answer as to why the material was removed is that it does not conform to the various wikipedia policies regarding notability, sourcing, and possibly conflict of interest. Dolphin and I have provided links to the help pages that clearly explain the policies and the reasoning behind them. I would suggest you read them, especially WP:ORIGINAL, WP:NPOV, WP:VERIFY, and WP:AGF I'd also suggest you drop the allegations of censorship - they just make your case look weak.

I'm sorry that your theory has apparently not attracted the attention you feel it deserves, but wikipedia is not the place to drum up notoriety. In fact it works exactly the opposite way - first the material must become notable, and only then does it warrant inclusion here. In other words, you need to do your PR work elsewhere first; come back when you have the requisite citations. I'll repeat myself, in case you missed it above:

From reliable sources:

Wikipedia articles should be based on reliable, published secondary sources and, to a lesser extent, on tertiary sources and primary sources. Secondary or tertiary sources are needed to establish the topic's notability and to avoid novel interpretations of primary sources. All analyses and interpretive or synthetic claims about primary sources must be referenced to a secondary or tertiary source, and must not be an original analysis of the primary-source material by Wikipedia editors.

One very clear problem with your edits is that you haven't established notability. Feel free to come back when you can. Mr. Swordfish (talk) 21:30, 1 August 2021 (UTC)

My Response on Talk:

The only reasonable thing to do is to subject New Theory of Flight to scrutiny by some expert such as Doug McLean. My case is strong because I have hard evidence published in leading journals, while the Wikipedia article on Lift (force) is very weak as made very clear in the Talk statement above by Doug. The Wikipedia article starts out with: 

There are several ways to explain how an airfoil generates lift. Some are more complicated or more physically rigorous than others; some have been shown to be incorrect. For example, there are explanations based directly on Newton's laws of motion and explanations based on Bernoulli's principle. Either can be used to explain lift.

This is very serious disinformation Mr Swordfish. Very serious. You apparently agree with the statement above by Anderson: "There is actually no agreement on what generates the aerodynamic force known as lift". You thus know very well that there is no scientific explanation of lift agreed to be correct (only incorrect ones agreed to be incorrect), yet you let Wikipedia inform the people of the World that there is one, or even better that there are many although most (all?) of them are incorrect. You must understand that this against the most basic of all Wikipedia principles your refer to: Wikipedia should not mislead the people. Who is telling you to do that? To cover up what is a fact reported by experts in serious media. 

I want to bring this case to highest level at Wikipedia. It is very serious and of great concern to the people. How do I proceed?

Added to Talk

Here is state of art of standard fluid mechanics as expressed by Doug McLean in his book Understanding Aerodynamics concerning scientific understanding of lift:

So in one sense, the physics of lift is perfectly understood: Lift happens because the flow obeys the NS equations with a no-slip condition on solid surfaces. On the other hand, physical explanations of lift, without math, pose a more difficult problem. Practically everyone, the nontechnical person included, has heard at least one nonmathematical explanation of how an airfoil produces lift when air flows past it. Such explanations fall into several general categories, with many variations. Unfortunately, most of them are either incomplete or wrong in one way or another. And some give up at one point or another and resort to math. This situation is a consequence of the general difficulty of explaining things physically in fluid mechanics, a problem we’ve touched on several times in the preceding chapters.

We read that generation of lift of a wing is a secret deeply hidden in the Navier-Stokes equations with no slip (unfortunately uncomputable because of very thin boundary layer), while scientific understanding in physical terms is a difficult problem, apparently unresolved. 

The New Theory of Flight reveals the secret of lift hidden in the Euler/Navier-Stokes equations with slip (without boundary layer and thus computable) in a description of slightly viscous incompressible flow around a long wing as potential flow modified by 3d rotational slip separation at the trailing edge into a turbulent wake, with potential flow generating large lift by sticking to the upper surface as a consequence of slip combined with 3d rotational slip separation at the trailing edge without the pressure rise of full potential flow destroying lift. 

In short: Standard CFD as Navier-Stokes with no-slip is uncomputable and beyond scientific reach and so hides the secret of lift, while Euler/Navier-Stokes with slip is computable and opens to reveal the true secret in a New Theory of Flight in the form of potential flow modified by 3d rotational slip separation. It is as simple as that. Details on Secret of Flight.

The split between mathematics (theory) and practice so clearly expressed above by McLean shows that the description made more than 50 years ago by Chemistry Nobel Laureate Hinshelwood (1997-1968) of practical fluid mechanics (hydraulics) describing phenomena (drag, lift), which cannot be explained, from theoretical fluid mechanics explaining phenomena (zero drag, lift), which cannot be observed,  is valid still today.  This is the background to the New Theory of Flight, which unites theoretical and practical fluid mechanics into one science for the first time.

Questions to Wikipedia

Before taking the case to higher levels I have posed the following questions on the Talk page to clarify the standpoint of Wikipedia (answers will be reported):

@Mr. swordfish,Dolphin51: Before I take the case further I pose the following basic questions connecting to e.g the Scientific American article with headline "No One Can Explain Why Planes Stay in the Air. Do recent explanations solve the mysteries of aerodynamic lift?" (i) Is this a correct description of the state of the science of lift according to Wikipedia? If not, what is incorrect? (ii) Is there an accepted scientific theory/explanation of the generation of lift at small drag of an airplane wing? If yes, which is this theory/explanation? (iii) Mr. Swordfish states above "It is true that there is no simple, correct, and complete theory of lift". Does this mean that there is a non-simple, correct and complete theory, if so which, or no such thing? (iv) The Wikipedia article starts out: "There are several ways to explain how an airfoil generates lift. Some are more complicated or more physically rigorous than others; some have been shown to be incorrect. For example, there are explanations based directly on Newton's laws of motion and explanations based on Bernoulli's principle. Either can be used to explain lift". There seems to be a contradiction between (i)+(ii)+(iii) and (iv), that is a contradiction between the statements (a) There is a commonly accepted scientific explanation of lift, and (b) There is no commonly accepted scientific explanation of lift. Which of (a) and (b) is the view of Wikipedia? I want a clear answer, not handwaving that (c) they are both correct since there are many theories carrying different elements, some true some false. It is against this background the New Theory of Flight stands out as the first explanation in both mathematical and physical terms of the generation of lift at small drag of a wing with solid documentation in the scientific literature, which you remove from visibility on Wikipedia. The matter is serious. The role of Wikepedia is to give correct information to the people, not double messages that there both is and is not a scientific explanation of lift. Ok?SecretofFlight (talk) 06:57, 3 August 2021 (UTC)

On Cover Up

Of course the Wikipedia article on Lift (force) is controlled by the fluid mechanics community. Of course this community wants to cover up that there still is no scientific theory of lift more than 100 years after the Wright Brothers took off in 1903, through the Wikipedia article telling people: There are several ways to explain how an airfoil generates lift. Some are more complicated or more physically rigorous than others; some have been shown to be incorrect. For example, there are explanations based directly on Newton's laws of motion and explanations based on Bernoulli's principle. Either can be used to explain lift. The true fact that there is no theory of lift and then no theory of flight is deadly poison to a whole field of science injected already 1755 through D'Alembert's Paradox, which remained unresolved until 2008 when Hoffman and Johnson as outsiders to the community presented a resolution followed by a New Theory of Flight both published in Journal of Mathematical Fluid Mechanics and thoroughly backed by computation and mathematical analysis.