Why is balancing on a stationary bike so much more difficult than on a moving one?
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When your wheels are in motion, they have momentum, which creates a kind of resisting force to “sideways falling”. Instead of falling on your side the wheels just lose momentum and slow down, but since you’re in practice always pedalling, you re-generate its momentum and stay balanced indefinitely as long as you can pedal.
There is a more accurate, more complex explanation (angular momenta, gyroscopes, etc.), but generally that’s what’s happening.
In high school physics you should have seen a demonstration of this, where your physics teacher has just the wheel in their hand, they make the wheel spin fast and hang the wheel on a thread that is tied to the axle of the bike wheel. If the bike wheel isn’t spinning it falls from vertical to horizontal in a very intuitive way, but when it’s spinning it just remains vertically upright (in a very unintuitive/surprising way), all because of the momentum described above.
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