The Roche phenomenon in the article is always an interesting one, for me. I know this will sound silly to most people here but my experience with the Bernoulli “explanation” for lift in aerofoils makes me feel a little uneasy about tidal forces in general.

I don’t mean that I find the Bernoulli explanation non-sensical — that’s a very common thing these days — more that the experience of listening to the falsehood presented as truth by so many people now means I am suspicious of other non-intuitive explanations.

In this specific case, I can’t get a good intuition about how tidal forces explain (1) Earth’s moon causing ocean bulges on both sides of Earth; and (2) tidal friction making Earth’s moon stop spinning and move further away. I feel like it’s one of those phenomena, like aerofoil lift, whose explanation is glossed over far too quickly given how odd the explanation is.