Why does a bike stay upright on its own?
A bicycle can be self-stable without gyroscopic or caster effects
Engineers built a strange-looking bike that balances itself without the two effects everyone thought were needed.
A riderless bicycle given a push will often stay upright by itself. Textbooks credited spinning wheels acting like gyroscopes, or the way the front wheel trails behind the steering axis. So engineers built a bike that had neither.
It still balanced itself, thanks to clever placement of its weight. Turns out we don’t fully understand bicycles, which is quietly brilliant for something invented in the 1800s.
Everyone can ride a bike. Nobody can fully explain one.