Missing Physics of Sailing

In The Secret of Sailing a new explanation of the physics of sailing is presented based on the new analysis of the generation of lift and drag of a wing in The Mathematical Secret of Flight and The Secret of Flight summarized in a talk.

Let us compare with current state-of-the-art:

• School of Physics U of New South Wales: Newton's old theory (incorrect)
• physicstoday: Bernoulli or Newton? (both incorrect or empty)
• Wikipedia: Like an airplane wing (empty)
• U of Alaska-Fairbanks: Bernoulli (incorrect or empty)
• Real World Physics Problems: Newton (incorrect)
• Teacher's Domain: Like an airplane wing (empty), Bernoulli (incorrect or empty)
• U of North Carolina: Bernoulli (incorrect or empty)
• howstuffworks: Bernoulli (incorrect or empty)
• The Physics of Sailing Explained: Bernoulli (incorrect or empty)

The most ambitious treatment is given in Physics of Sailing by J. Kimball, where both Bernoulli and Kutta-Zhukovsky's circulation theory are presented, but with a disappointing sum-up on p 163:

• The sail experiences lift because the sail deflects the wind. Equal and opposite forces mean that is the sail pushes the wind in one direction, the wind pushes the sail the other way. This explanation, which relies only on the rule of equal and opposite forces, is surely correct.

Yes, it is surely correct, as any empty theory which explains nothing, as illustrated in the above picture.

We see that there is surely a great need for a correct theory which explains the physics of sailing and that there is no such theory as state-of-the-art.

Our work fills this gap in physics theory and in particular shows that the state-of-the-art explanations represented by Newton, Bernoulli or Kutta-Zhukovsky are all incorrect.

Of course, the physics of flying and sailing is not of any interest to physicists of today paralyzed by string theory, but it is an interesting problem of physics of importance to many.