When most of us think of boomerangs, we imagine somebody (quite possibly a cartoon character) throwing a banana-shaped stick that eventually turns around and comes right back to the thrower's hand (possibly after hitting another cartoon character in the head). This idea is simply amazing, and as children, our first reaction to such a device was: This stick is obviously possessed with magical powers! Of course, the person or people who discovered the boomerang hadn't actually found a magical stick, but they had come upon an amazing application of some complex laws of physics