Who in the world, past grade school age, flies paper airplanes? Nobody, it seems, except a legion of physicists, engineers, pilots and otherwise normal adults who begin folding up at the very sight of a plain piece of paper. What coaxed their secret hobby out into the open was the Scientific American's tongue-in-cheek announcement three months ago that it would sponsor the First International Paper-Airplane Competition. The paper-plane buffs took the offer seriously, so much so that the magazine found itself inundated with 10,941 entries from 49 states and 26 foreign countries.
To...