Veritasium
7 HN recommenders · recommended in 10 months, 2021–2025
11:22 · 25M views · Nov 28, 2021
Veritasium explains why bicycles are stable, arguing that gyroscopic effects are not the answer. The video shows countersteering and an experiment where riders blocked from steering the opposite way cannot turn.
HN links it in threads on bikes, countersteering and control systems as the clearest demonstration of how bikes actually steer and balance.
17 comments from Hacker News
You will love the interesting video, "Most People Don't Know How Bikes Work" by Veritasium - this video
Beautifully illustrated and brilliantly explained. Derek Muller (Veritasium) on YouTube has a related video diving into the mechanics of bicycle riding. It shows what happens if you prevent the rider from performing the countersteer before leaning into a turn [1]. [1]: this video
> You only think you understand how a bicycle works, until you learn to ride one. I realize this is just for motivation in a subtitle, but people generally don't grasp how bicycles work, even after having ridden one. Veritasium has a quite good video on the subject: this video
Veritasium did a video where they stopped him from counter-steering and couldn't steer anymore. this video He might be wrong, and just didn't know enough, but he is usually researching his videos very well and I would be surprised for him to be wrong about this.
Beautiful article. There's a similar neat video, "Most People Don't Know How Bikes Work", where they fix the steering so the handlebars can only be turned left, and people then aren't able to turn left. this video