segedunum wrote:Why on Earth anyone should think that two separate paths of air are linked in some way (telepathy perhaps?) I don't know.
I haven't asked them all, but I think there is occasionally a connection to the notion that nature 'abhors a vaccuum', so it would hate to find a chunk of air missing as one bit went "the long way", so it pulls the air faster over the top, the result being that both bits of air happily meet-up again at the tail of the foil.
I guess it would keep most folk happy, if they weren't inclined to wonder how a plane can fly upside-down with this explanation, then equal-time should be good enough.
I dunno, as long as they get taught the proper stuff before being asked to design jumbo jets, it's probably not a huge problem.
We teach children the integer number line, don't jump straight to complex numbers, and I think we still start them off with electrons like little planets in orbit, before we get all probability distribution on their ass ... so a rough, vague, incomplete, incorrect, comprehension is probably not doing much real harm. But eventually, right would be better.