Question: why do boomerangs come back?

Alex Reid answered on 7 Nov 2018:

I didn’t know the answer to this so I asked our lab technician who is into this kind of stuff (he is a juggler among other things). He said that the wings of a boomerang generate lift, like an airplane wing, and the curvature of a boomerang channels this lift into a wide 360 degree arc depending on how you throw it. I am glad he had something intelligent to say about it because my initial response was to say ‘because it was lonely’!