By Roman Soto
Most esteemed colleagues gathered here today: following my arduous years of research, I take pride in having discovered the age-old question behind the unique mechanisms of animal flight. Mother Nature works in wondrous and mysterious ways; thus, to inquire of such a puzzling phenomenon merely reveals the curious intricacies behind human mentation.
When an animal takes flight, delves into the open air, and boasts of a journey of unlimited opportunity, its every wingbeat distorts the very laws of physics that prior pioneers of knowledge, such as Isaac Newton, have established. “Roman, you absolute lunatic,” you must think, “Please, reveal your ever-so-brilliant and revolutionary theory that you speak so profusely of.” Well, fellows, the theory goes as follows: Gravity, a formerly universal principle manipulating the physical mechanics of the world, becomes confused as a creature’s wings beat. Take a hummingbird. An extremely tiny creature with flapping wings, invisible to the naked eye…and to gravity itself. Allow me to elaborate: the hummingbird’s extremely fast wing speed theoretically embarrasses gravity, since it perceives the bird as falling sideways. If this process is repeated across many frames per second, the law of gravity determines that the bird is flying sideways; meanwhile, to the human eye, the bird appears to simply fly.