StarTalk Radio - An Exercise in Physics

Episode Date: December 18, 2020

What would a quantum stadium look like? Can you race Formula 1 on Mars? Neil deGrasse Tyson, co-hosts Gary O’Reilly and Chuck Nice, and astrophysicist Charles Liu answer fan-submitted Cosmic Queries on the physics of sports. NOTE: StarTalk+ Patrons can watch or listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: https://www.startalkradio.net/show/an-exercise-in-physics/ Photo Credit: Storyblocks. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to new episodes ad-free and a whole week early.

Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk Sports Edition, Cosmic Queries. Got with me, Jack Nice, co-host. Hey, what's happening? Always good to have Jack. Always a pleasure. Yeah, this is sports edition, and you're not an athlete, so.

Just want to make that clear. Disclosure to the audience. I am sometimes when I'm sleeping. Sometimes I sleep. And you wake up after you have won the gold medal. Right, and they put the medal around my neck, and then I wake up like, oh, damn. Gary O'Reilly. Gary.

Hey, Neil. My other co-host in this, which is the legit street cred part of this triad here. Chuck, I still have that dream, by the way. You wake up, and there's still no gold medal. But you know what? You've got to have a dream. Got it. So, Gary, when were you playing professional soccer in the U.K.?

When was that? I spanned three decades. Seriously? Yeah. I am that old. The 70s, late part of the 70s, and moved through into the early part of the 90s. So I made my professional debut at a rather famous club, Tottenham Hotspur in London at the age of 19 okay cool yeah and absolutely totally and decrepit old fart so today in this cosmic queries we're going to do

the physics of sports and you know I try to wax poetic about that often in my social media but to really do it right we had to reach into our rolodex and find our resident geek in chief and chuck you know who that is there's only one person there's only one and that's charles lu charles hi neil gary chuck it's so good to see you again hello hello welcome back to star talk chuck isn't charles i start chuck whichever you want can also go by chuck but we have two chucks so i'm going with charles charles is an old friend a co-author a colleague and so we go way back and he just started a new rock band. Yeah. Is that true? I hadn't heard.

Well, I'm just judging by your hair. Yes, I'm conducting a scientific experiment. What will happen to my facial expression if I don't cut my hair for a year? Yeah, yes, the COVID haircut, the non-haircut. It's very exciting, right. The COVID non-haircut. If you develop superhuman strength, stay away from any woman with scissors.

That's all I'm saying. The record shows. Well, you know, my brother-in-law saw me for the first time on Zoom in quite some time a few weeks ago, and he said that still counts as a midlife crisis. Growing your hair long? Oh, yeah. Interesting. Oh, and one thing about that story. Growing your hair long? Oh, yeah. Interesting.

Oh, and one thing about that story with cutting your hair. So do you know who cut Samson's hair? Not Delilah. Was it Delilah or wasn't it? Yeah, see, it turns out it wasn't. Delilah's stylist. It's not Delilah. Was it Vidal Sassoon? Because, you know, if Samson doesn't look good, he doesn't look good.

Exactly. It was Mott. Delilah got Vidal Sassoon to cut Samson. No, you can win a bar bet on that if you wanted to and just show it to him. But anyhow, so Charles. Yes. to him but anyhow so so charles yes uh i just you are on this program because however geeky anybody is there's always someone on the geek spectrum geekier than than than you think you are right so you are the geekiest person we've ever had on this show and so you represent that that that

extreme limit the way we need binoculars to find where you are on that scale. You are the supernova of geekitude. You are all kind beyond kind. Thank you, but I would just once love to be able to score that winning goal the same way that Gary has and Chuck has in his dreams

all these years. Oh, okay. We all do it in different ways, Charles. We all achieve the same thing in different ways, yeah. So let me give you a pedigree here. So you're a professor of astrophysics at the College of Staten Island at the City University of New York. Yes.

And you're an associate at my Hayden Planetarium. Yes. I'm delighted to have you on our staff there. Thank you. So you're an associate, so it means we reach for you when we need you and you contribute and participate in many of our excellent programs. And they just came out with the Handy Physics Answer Book coming out like it came out this year and it's part of the Handy Answer Book series. And so that's just great. So it's that kind of background that you have not only in astrophysics but in basic physics that contributes to this.

So, Gary, you got the first question. I have, and this is from our Patreon patrons, and we are lovely with them. And, right, this is Isam Kabaz. lovely with them and right this is isam kabaz since most sports contain some degree of probability or chance i wonder if a new sport can be devised that takes into account the probability presented by something like and this is going to go way over my head wave particle duality oh wow Five particle duality. Oh, wow.

Because that sounds like a surfboard for two. But I'm guessing that's my low brain attitude to this. So please, guys, you've got to expand on that. So Charles, what do you think? Oh, by the way, let me just say that the sport with some of the least probability involved in it is wrestling. Okay. It's you and your muscles against the your opponent and their muscles and it's not did you hit the ball in the right fraction of an inch or is the wind going in the right direction if you if you look if you lose your ass lost okay it's just that unless

for some reason your muscle had a twitch for no good reason a random twitch quantum mechanically induced twitch that caused your arm to suddenly be pinned behind your back the odds of that are slim i admit that force you to just go to your back like with for no reason so so wave particle duality gary is a fundamental part of quantum theory so so frenchman willem de broglie uh he he basically said and explained that there is this wave-particle duality. So a little particle like an electron behaves simultaneously both as a particle, something with negative charge, for example, and as a wave. So it produces interference effects and things like that

just as an ocean wave might in a larger environment. De Broglie also... Two ocean waves. Two ocean waves coming through and hitting each other. That's right. The odd thing is that even something large like a baseball or a soccer ball or something like that is also a matter wave. But the wavelength is so tiny, far smaller than an atomic nucleus, that we in the macroscopic world will never notice those wave effects. So in a sense, we are all waves of matter kind of interacting with other waves of matter. But with wavelengths so small, it's as if that wave action didn't matter.

So if you wanted to use wave-particle duality to actually have some effect in a sport, you'd have to be on the microscopic level. I might imagine someday in the future where instead of playing video games like this, there might be a special kind of video game that you were zooming in and looking at a tiny subatomic realm, in a sense. All right, well, Chuck, let's just blow that out and say...

Yeah. So let's say in the future we have such power over the universe that we can change the value of the physical constants and so now i've created within a small area of the no no no i've created a quantum stadium and in that stadium plank's constant is really large and so so you start getting these quantum effects with regular everyday objects and people and phenomenon. So tell me, what sport would you devise that could be like a quantum Olympic entry?

Oh, well, okay. Not to get extra geeky on you on that. No, you are geeky. If you were to increase Planck's constant to that level, you'd also have massive fluctuations of energy within that stadium. So that at any given time, something equivalent to a nuclear explosion

would go off right in front of one of your players. And so that's something you don't want. That's a game I want to go to. So you said bad ideas, which is... Well, I mean, if it were something like car wars or, you know, Mad Max or something where you have cars, all you're trying to do is get from one place to the next and random explosions can be going off in the stadium at any time.

See, the sport of the future, Charles, will involve more fan interaction. So if you've got a stadium, Neil, in your quantum stadium, then all of a sudden they shout whilst the offense is in motion. That then becomes something that derails that offense by moving it. Can we do some... Yeah?

So if you get enough people coordinated in their actions, you can influence the outcome of the sport. Well, it's already happening on Twitch, for example. So if you have a situation beyond the video realm into the physical realm, then I would devise a sport kind of where you would have an object that could randomly move and the goal of the team is to grab that object or to otherwise obtain this randomly moving thing.

Sounds like Quidditch. You are absolutely right. So maybe the Quidditch pitch is indeed a quantum stadium, just like you described. Nice. And the birdie or whatever that's called, that's following quantum rules for its position. What's it called? The birdie. The golden snitch.

The snitch. I'm sorry, the snitch. Excuse me. The snitch. I do like birdie the golden snitch excuse me the snitch i do like birdie though that sounds so the the golden snitch is its position in three-dimensional four-dimensional space and time is quantum determined because they don't know where it's going that would be that case although presumably in harry potter's wizardry. Yeah, it's not quantum determined, but it's magically determined or even sentiently determined. It's not clear if, in fact, the golden snitch is alive or not. I was going to say the golden snitch may have a consciousness

because when you look at the way it moves, it's clearly not random. It's trying to evade the players, so you never know. But in a quantum world, it could pop in and out of existence, which means it would be even cooler. Totally cooler if you add a fourth dimension of time in there. If you entangled the golden snitch, so that it could instantaneously provide information somewhere else. That would be almost like teleportation.

Right. So it could just be in one part of the stadium, and then when you go to reach it, it's gone, and then it's over there now. Or that'd be kind of cool. E-Sam, I hope that's your answer, fella. I mean, how

deep does this rabbit hole go? Let's find out. Okay, now, if I can add an addendum to this, if I may, Charles, in recent years, who's the guy who plays Ant-Man? Oh, Scott Lang? No.

Paul Rudd. No, Paul Rudd. Paul Rudd, I think, collaborated with Stephen Hawking to create the rules for quantum chess. Aha. rules for quantum chess where when you try to take a piece there's a probability that that piece is a different piece or is not even there and so you're judging what the likelihood is of the success of that move will be at every time you make a move so you can google it quantum chess it's pretty cool yeah season two of queen's gambit right there there you go well let's not get into ant-man and and quantum stuff because that's a whole nother someone might ask well yeah let's let's get to the to the questions okay by the way yeah so okay all right so so chuck you're next

you got okay you finally reboot your your ipad i rebo rebooted my little iPad, and so I'm good now. Okay, so this is from Violetta. She's 12 years old. Oh, fabulous. Yes, and she has a story that's too long to read, but thank you for the story. Oh, by the way, just a quick thing. Violetta, I guess, is little Violet, right?

So you know the rhyme roses are red? every five years I tweet roses are red, violets are violet period unless you don't have very strong sensitivity in the ultraviolet or the violet spectrum in which case they actually look blue

the tweet is not intended for people with limited sight. For Charles Liu. I'm wearing blue blocker glasses, right? Right, right. UV blocking glasses. Okay. So what does Violetta have to say?

She's 12 years old? Very cool. Okay. And she basically says. Wait a minute. Is she a Patreon member? Wait a minute. Yes.

Her mom is. It's Violetta and mom. And mom. Okay. Izzy. Good. And mom Izzy is a Patreon member and for that we say thanks for the money.

Chuck, it's thanks for your support. Oh, I'm sorry. Well, you know, see that's I know now I'm giving myself away because people are just like, I support you. I'm like, I don't need your support. I want your money. That reminds me of Pearl Bailey once said during, Pearl Bailey, old singer, actors.

She said on Valentine's Day, honey, on Valentine's Day, I want a five-pound box of money. I love it. You all know the Beatles song-pound box of money. That's right. I love it. You all know the Beatles song Money, right? Yes. Yeah, right. Money can't buy everything is true, but money can't buy, I can't use. I need your money.

I need money. That's what I want. All together now. All right, so here's Violetta. Who's never heard of the Beatles or Pearl Bailey. I'll bet she has. Well, she has now. This is great.

She's talking about STEM, and to her, STEM should be STEM with a B on the end that is silent that stands for baseball. Yes! Oh, look at Chuck Lue. Chuck Lue's excited about that. What a sport. Okay, so science, tech, engineering, math, and baseball. And she says this. Dr. Lou, I am wondering, as far as the physics may go,

are there any skills that you can think of that might give women a particular advantage in baseball? Maybe like rather than trying to throw the fast pitch, developing interesting off-speed pitches instead. trying to throw the fast pitch, developing interesting off-speed pitches instead. Can you think of any other areas of untapped baseball physics that players of any gender haven't yet explored to their fullest potential? P.S. I love all the StarTalk episodes and having you as a guest. You always are so gracious and your answers to questions are fascinating. Thank you for being you. Signed, Charles Blue's mom.

Oh! Oh! Hey, Chuck, Violetta does say, and in all modesty, and she's talking about, I play baseball, and I'm just saying, I'm pretty good.

Oh, right. Good for you, Violetta. Love that. Well, Viol. I'm pretty good. Good for you, Violeta. Love that. Oh, Violeta and Izzy, thank you so much for the question. Thank you for your kind words. It's very sweet. Baseball is a tremendous sport, and it is a wonderful way to learn STEM, actually. There are so many intricacies of it, and so much of it requires scientific understanding, not just hitting home runs, right?

But your question is very, very good. A lot of people have... And Charles, we've got two minutes, so be tight. Okay, go. People have this preconceived notion that you have to have a certain body type or a certain way of playing individual sports.

And for baseball, that's one of the sports where any kind of body type or any kind of thing that you can bring to the table that's unique can help you stand out. Exhibit A, Babe Ruth, body built on beer and hot dogs. Yes. So I would say, for example, if you were looking for a typical female physique, yes, your pitching will allow you.

Your pitching will allow you, you might be able to have unusual pitches because you're able to have the ball leave your hand or your whole arm structure in a different way. If you're running the bases, for example, you may be able to, through flexibility or through other kinds of training, be able to dodge tags if you're trying to steal a base. Or you might be able to leap in the field, uh, find certain ways to grab things and throw better. So Chuck, this would be a flexibility that women tend to enjoy more ways than men do. Statistically speaking, that's true. That's right. And also things like, so for throwing a ball, for example, your fingers. And then of course, uh, there's the strike zone, right? The strike zone is supposedly from your shoulders to your knees, so it doesn't matter how big or how small you are.

If you're able to reach a ball in the strike zone, it's always going to be roughly a level playing field. And in some senses, for example, they're famous. Except for where the pitching mound is. It's raised. Right. Well, the mound was actually lower. Chuck, I'm trying to put jokes jokes in here and where are you but you know that's that i mean you're you're talking about

field technicalities well the the mound was lowered in the 60s because bob gibson is ridiculous because of bob gibson's ridiculous 1.12 era back when he was pitching for the Cardinals that year. But yeah, so they're very famous players who have such good crouches that their strike zones were small and it gave them an advantage in hitting. So it may well be the case that you can take advantage of that if your body type or your physique matches that of yours. How about a woman's lower center of gravity? Would that come into play in any way, shape, or form? In baseball, I could only imagine that if you're trying to field a hot ground ball to third base or something like that, that you might be able to move laterally more effectively than someone whose body mass is more weighted toward the top because you have to move more of your mass a larger distance in order to go sideways.

Charles, would that not help with hitting a lower center of gravity where you are able to get under a pitch and hit it up? Right. Well, in baseball, most hitters are taught not to get under the ball to try to lift a ball fly ball, but rather hit the ball level. You just want to make contact. Right. And have strong level contact. So yes, if you're lower and a pitcher can't quite get the ball down or is trying to get the ball down so that you only hit ground balls, you may be able to be more flexible either with your crouch or just have a smaller height to be able to hit the ball where you want it to go because you have a better opportunity to pick off the ball before it does its break or before it gets too low. And people with famously high lifetime batting averages were not statistically larger than your average baseball players. I mean, you look at... Maybe the best example is Wade Boggs, who was famous for having a low crouch, and his lifetime batting average was tremendous. Then one year, he decided to prove to people that he could actually hit the long ball also, because he was tired of people saying, yeah, well, all you do is hit line drives.

And he wound up having a great year hitting home runs. So he just proved that. And also with the lower center of mass, not all plays at the plate is the ball exactly where it needs to be for the tag. So the catcher will have to catch it and then move lower to a lower position. And so if you were already down there, that could give you a few extra scoring opportunities because of that. But excellent, Chuck.

We've got to take a quick break. When we come back, more of StarTalk Cosmic Queries, the physics of sports. We're back. StarTalk Sports Edition. Cosmic Queries. The physics of sport. Love that subject. And Gary and Chuck are giving us questions from our fan base

and handing them to our resident geek in chief, friend and colleague, Charles Liu. Hello. Hi. All right. All right. So who's next? Who's next up?

Is it Chuck? You got a question for him? I think Gary. Okay. I'll jump in. Right. This one, another one of our patreon patrons cameron bishop um hi guys i have a question about motorsports specifically formula

one uh how oh charles is already excited how would we need to adapt our cars which are already very complicated engineering feats for a Grand Prix hosted somewhere like Mars. Well, first you have to make sure that Lewis Hamilton is wearing a helmet. Otherwise, he won't be able to breathe very well. But beyond that, Formula One, it has primarily improved car performance over the years by becoming more and more aerodynamic. Right. They're using airplane technology to make sure that the cars actually stay on the road better, that they can turn corners better, and just go faster.

The car is flying in reverse. Literally, yes. It's flying in reverse. It's a really good way to say it. The problem is, of course, Mars has your back. I think the future of Formula 1 should be rocket engines. I'm sorry. That's just me.

That's just me. You know, solid rocket boosters. NASA should sponsor Formula 1 and strap on some SRBs, and then it wins every time. Wait. Let me just. Here's the. The cornering is the problem. Gary is exactly right.

I was going to say. Because it's not a drag race, right? Right. This actually requires some skill and finesse here. So here's the first post-race interview after Neil's thing. It's like, so it was an interesting experiment. What are all those marks on the wall? Those are the cars.

You mean where the cars hit? No, those are the actual cars. Can you imagine a rocket-powered Formula One Grand Prix in Monte Carlo? Oh, my gosh. There'd be cars sticking out of buildings. Oh, that'd be terrible. I've got to work on that detail. But you're on to something, Neil, because, for example, on Mars,

the atmospheric pressure is less than 1% that of the atmospheric pressure here on Earth. So internal combustion engines wouldn't work. So you would have to have something like a rocket. Okay, so what you're trying to do is you need some device that will steal more air from its surroundings than would otherwise be naturally fed to the engine. Because you need that. That is the actual propulsion. It's the induction of air and then the combustion out the back. In the cavity that then sends it out the back.

Right. So, okay. And so that way, a rocket engine might actually be the best solution. So you can avoid the issue of atmosphere altogether. Because after all most of the atmosphere in mars is carbon dioxide which won't help you with a jet engine as we understand them anyway right would that polluting effect in the environment we haven't done that good a job here are we now going to export that to mars it would be an environmental disaster i agree

fabulous let's do that then yeah but then cars would not need to be nearly so aerodynamic either. So you would have to focus on control, your ability to stay on the road when you're going at ridiculous speeds. That's a fascinating point, Charles. So because the atmospheric pressure is so low, aerodynamics is, you could have like a brick. You don't have the resistance. Yeah, you don't need airfoils and funny, funky shapes.

It would be a 1% effect as opposed to a much larger effect. We'd be racing Mercedes G wagons, which would have the aerodynamics of a brick. A box. A box of rain. Yeah. You would not have to worry about the shape of your vehicle nearly so much. You want instead to know the shape would be depending on whether or not you can grip the road, whether you can make the turns at very high speeds and things like that.

Some of the physics is very similar. You want a low center of gravity. You want good traction, things like that. But the power ratio compared with the shape structure would be very different. So, Charles, because the gravity is less, it's like 40% of Earth's gravity. Does that affect the slope of the bank turns if you have a bank turn at all? It would. I'm thinking NASCAR really there. Yes.

It would because you have bank turns. But remember that the issue of your angular momentum is more important when you're going at very high speed than the gravitational pull, right? Because your gravity, you're going to, their car is literally going to be like the sand in a bucket that is being swung up and down at the beach you're you're going to stay on regardless of whether or not you have the

gravity pulling on you because your angular momentum is so much greater okay so if i go up a hill at 200 plus miles per hour on Mars, am I likely to stay on the ground once I reach the peak? Or have I gone, I want to say airborne, but that's not quite. You want to go into orbit, Gary? Is that what you're trying to do? No, I'm just going to say,

how do I, how are we working that out in terms of avoiding me? If I were to do the physics real quick in my head, 200 miles an hour, you would fly off, yes. You'd have to be almost vertical in order not to fly off. You'd still rise quite up high. So the race would have to be slower? The race would be slower or the slopes would have to be higher if you're banking your curves, right?

To keep you on one way or the other. Think about Olympus Mons, right, the tallest volcano on Mars. tallest volcano on Mars. That thing is many times taller than Mount Everest because the gravitational acceleration at the surface of Mars is lower than that on Earth. So these mountains can rise higher. So that's what you'd have to do with the banks. The race to the top of that volcano. That would be something.

That's a Grand Prix for sure. All right. Yeah. All right. All right. Cool, man. All right. Next up. right. All right, cool, man. All right. Okay, let's move on.

Let me just add to follow up quickly on Chuck's point. This reason why the combustion engines have trouble is the same reason why regular airplanes, there's a limit to how high they can fly at any given speed because they have to suck in enough air to make that the jet engine phenomenon work so yeah we take so much for granted down here at sea level of what's going on right super cool and yeah okay uh so planes can be like icarus is what you're saying well but instead of being burned by the sun, they run out of there. Run out of there and fall. Yeah, yeah. All right, here we go.

This is Ruvan was here, and he says, how the heck does one throw a curveball? What physics is going on there? Ruvan wants to know. I would say, you know what? I'm going to throw this to Gary a little bit because throwing curveball, the reason the ball curves, is very similar to the reason a soccer ball curves when it gets kicked. And so I want the true athlete to sort of explain why the ball curves, and then I can bring on the physics for the baseball in particular. You mean you want Gary to say what he has to do to make the ball curve? Yes, exactly. And then you'll give the physics of that. So, Gary. Gary to say what he has to do to make the ball curve. Yes, exactly.

You'll give the physics of that. So Gary, I would like to do that. Okay. When I was, first of all, Gary, why would you want to, first of all, Gary, why would you want to curve a soccer ball? Don't you want to just kick it straight in? No, no. So, okay. In a certain time, I want to disable the, say the goal goalkeeper, the goal minder and have them think the ball is going from left to right, and therefore they move that way,

and then the ball just comes back in from right to left. So they're committing their body momentum in the wrong direction. So once I get the body weight loaded to one side in particular, it's going to be very difficult for them to adjust to the movement of the ball. Gary, that's just not nice. Hence my prefix of this is devious. And when it works, do you go, ha-ha, tricked you, like that?

Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, another thing is, the route to goal may be blocked. You see this in free kicks. Where they build a wall to protect the goal, and then all of a sudden

someone... And then they use their hands to protect the goal, and then all of a sudden someone... And then they use their hands to protect their private parts. Well, of course, yeah. So they themselves are the wall. One must protect the crown jewels at all times. Okay. Right? And the most famous free kick in recent times

was Roberto Carlos against France. I think it's 1997. France versus Brazil, or Brazil versus France. Wait, 1997 is recent times? That's 23 years ago. How old are you? I'm 1,000 years old, so 23 years ago is recent. I remember that goal.

It was ridiculous, yeah. In answer to your question, Neil, you can carbon date me after the show. So Roberto Carlos comes up to the ball outside of his left foot. He's now addressing, he's coming up to the ball, addressing the ball on the right-hand side. So as you're going to kick it with his left foot, he hits it on the outside of the ball, on the right-hand side.

Now, if you imagine the ball has an imaginary equator, he's got to hit right on that equatorial point, but in towards the, slightly more into the middle so as he can get power to make it travel the distance. But because he hits across it, he imparts this spin, this rotation. And you can see from a camera behind the ball, it deviates by about two yards or more.

It is going wide of the goal and then all of a sudden it cuts back in in a most vicious way. The goalkeeper is a World Cup winning goalkeeper, Barthez, who, if you can imagine this, looks a little bit like the old Hollywood actor Donald Pleasence, who was a Bond villain, if I'm not mistaken. There you go. But more famously for being, I think it was Cindy Crawford's partner at some stage. There you go. There's your sad nugget of information. Not sad for Donald Pleasence. You know what? Yes, in answer.

So, Charles, we were taught you can't hit too fine. You have to make contact in the meat of the ball. But if you hit lower, the ball will spin and rise. If you kind of hit across that equatorial plane, it will stay in a lower trajectory and travel, and you'll make more contact with the ball and therefore impart more power and force through the ball. Okay, so if you kick it on the right side,

giving it kind of like from the top a counterclockwise spin, it'll then veer left. Yes. Okay. And you will angle your run to approach it so as you really do slice across it, but with such power. And this ball's going to travel 30 yards. There's a trade-off between maximizing the spin

by hitting it just at the outer edge and putting some meat on the kick to have the thing move forward. So Charles, this is why I guess curveballs are never as fast as fastballs. Correct. Because some of the energy the pitcher's using is going to spin it. You are 100%

correct. And Gary, thank you. That was just an excellent explanation that was going on. You're welcome. From the recent goal 23 years ago. But still most likely immortal. One of the most amazing goals ever. Except maybe the 86 Diego

Maradona goal in the World Cup, but that didn't have as much to do with aerodynamics. That was against England, so we do not... That was not as much aerodynamics as just ridiculous skill, but that's another story. And then there was the hand goal ahead of that, but let's let that aside.

As you said, it was against England. Okay. The curveball requires that the pitcher push the ball a little bit sideways as it's being thrown giving it a twist and not pushing it straight on as hard as you can right in the middle because the baseball like the soccer ball is not a perfect sphere it can then interact as it spins with the air that it encounters on the way to the plate. It's not that the ball is oblong. You mean the surface is textured. The surface is ever so different. It's not a perfectly smooth sphere. It's textured. Yeah, that's right. That's

the right way to put it. And so as a result, you can create the curve action. Now with a baseball, it's considered a rigid body, right? It doesn't change its shape nearly as much as a soccer ball does. So when you hit the ball, the soccer ball, the deformation of the soccer ball provides an even greater change, which is why you can have this sort of L-shaped turn. With a curveball, you just kind of get a little bit of a yee kind of thing. That's a different scale of motion, and also the distances are different. So what's happening with the forces on the ball with the air and the forces? You have the spin, which is creating a non-laminar flow around the ball. And then the laces of the baseball accentuate that point. So the more you

spin it, the more likely it's going to happen. If you had a perfectly smooth uniform baseball, then the ball may not curve, no matter how much spin you put on it, because there isn't the opportunity to disturb the air around it. So when you disturb the air, it creates an unequal force left and right on the ball. Right. Or up and down for that matter. Or up and down. Right, right. Another level of deviousness. The sinking or the rising fastball will do it, right? So another level of deviousness for the soccer player, and it's all about deviousness,

a baseball is a solid object. A soccer ball is inflated. I know you're ahead of me on this, but the aperture in which you inflate the ball, if you strike through that, you then have, Charles, am I right, some sort of pressure change, and you have a definite impact, pun intended,

on the deformation of the ball, and it will knuckle as you're in a baseball pitch. That's right. So when you see people setting up the soccer ball for a penalty kick or a free kick, you always notice that the place where you stick the inflating pin in is somewhere where the player can actually hit it with the foot. Yeah, it's pretty amazing.

And the most devious thing is in baseball, if the pitcher actually kicks the ball towards the plate. Or spits on it. Spits on it. Remember the spitball? I don't know if you were around back then. Gary surely was. Let's be super harsh now. I don't know if you were around back then, but the – Gary surely was. Yeah. Thank you.

Let's be super harsh now. The last baseball pitcher in the major leagues who was allowed to throw a spitball, I believe, was Satchel Paige. Because everyone who used to throw spitballs were grandfathered in and allowed to do it thereafter. If you put water on the ball and then you throw it with whatever spin you have, you even create even more change because that changes the aerodynamics, it changes the ability for the ball to go through, like what's slippery and what's not.

You also create water that kind of comes out and it changes the trajectory. Spitballs are ridiculous, they're terrible. And then you try to hit the ball, the ball hits the bat and the ball is slippery. So it's going to go swirling away. So there's a script ball, and then there's the Hockaloogie ball.

You mean the illegal ball. The blob of stuff coming, right? And the batter's like, oh, look at that. I'm not hitting that. I'm not hitting that. Guys, we've got to cut that for a second and final break.

And when we come back, we'll have more StarTalk Sports Edition and Cosmic Queries, the physics of sports. We're back. StarTalk Sports Edition. Cosmic Queries, the physics of sports. And while I know a little bit of this, you knew we brought in our resident geek-in-chief, Charles Liu. Charles.

What a pleasure to be here. Thank you. He's there. Okay. So let's continue this. Gary and Chuck, what questions do you have? Here it is. This is from Stephen Summers.

He's a Patreon patron, and he wants to know this. Greetings, doctors of space comedy. Question for him. Hey! Hey! He says, questions for Dr. Liu. I'm involved in a high-stakes game of Domjot later today against some nasty... That'd be Nausicaans? Nausicaans, yeah.

Yeah, they love Domjot. Not to be confused with Snossages. Now, I need an ad, she says. Any recommendations? Should I turn off the grav plating or create a spatial anomaly or just keep my phaser set to extra crispy? Wait, what the hell? Okay, what the hell was that?

What a great question. What was that? What a great question. What was that? Domjot is a game in the Star Trek Next Generation Deep Space Nine universe, which is some sort of a mix between pool and pinball. It was introduced in Star Trek Next uh next generation season seven episode tapestry which is kind of like it's a wonderful life why do you know this he's a geek but in this episode yes uh john luke picard played by patrick stewart it's kind of like jimmy stewart and it's a one sort of lives his past as if he were able to

make different decisions and so forth. But in that, the Nausicaans are a bunch of really big looking, scary looking thugs and they want to play Domjot. Domjot, you know, play human, play Domjot. And so they're playing this time.

But they cheated. No! Yeah, so he was cheating too. And it's all kinds of funny things like that. So, so let me just answer very quickly. There's a great question, but I would never countenance anyone trying to stack the deck and cheat, especially against some angry Nausicaans,

because they will rip off your appendages if they get that angry. So I would say to try to play and beat them fair and square, it is well known that Nausicaans always try to roll the tarot into straight nines. They always want that because it's considered a cool thing for them way beyond the importance of it in the game.

I knew that. I knew that. Chuck, you knew that too, right? So play to block Nausicaans attempts to roll the tarot the game. I knew that. Chuck, you knew that too, right? So play to block Nausicaan's attempts to roll the taric into straight nines. And they will take silly risks which will then allow you to sort of piecemeal

win this game. Now, be sure, however, if you're careful, if you're playing, for example, on deep space nine in quarks, make sure that Odo is there to provide enough security so that the Noxicons do not rip off your appendages.

And here's the real answer. Be sure not to ask this question if you don't have a girlfriend. Because what you need to do, what you need to do, is go get a girlfriend first! And then you can ask this kind of question!

That's the real answer. Go get a girlfriend first. And then you can ask this kind of question. Okay? See, that's the real answer. Listen, you better have a girlfriend is the answer to this question. I don't know, Chuck. I suspect that question and answer might help attract a girlfriend or boyfriend. Unfortunately, only female Narcissians will be attracted to that question. Okay, so, Stephen, you have the choice of two answers. You.

All right, let's move on. What do you got, Gary? All right, let's do it. We got to do lightning round. We got to get through all these questions. The minimal. So, Charles, give me, like, soundbite answers. Okay.

Got you. Here's a question from The Minimalistic Soul. How to get strength back with minimal efforts? I'll answer this one. Take you. Here's a question from The Minimalistic Soul. How to get strength back with minimal efforts? I'll answer this one. Take steroids. Next. You want a real answer? Yeah, yeah.

Go ahead. Strength. Repetition of different muscle groups at various lengths over long periods of time. Cool. As a training regimen. As a training regimen. As a training regimen. Yes, yes. So that when you actually are called to task on that,

you will recover more quickly. Correct. Yes. Okay. All right. All right. Here we go. This is Andrew Gundro.

Gundro. He said it, Chuck, if you pronounce it like gumbo, you got it. Guarantee. Guarantee. Here we go. So he says, hey, guys, a common criticism for the introduction of science into sports is that it can take away from the soul of the game, potentially ruining the challenge

faced by the athletes and the enjoyment experienced by the fans. How should we evaluate whether the introduction of science or data or AI will be truly good for the overall sport or whether it will improve individual players' performance but ruin the overall game. So when does it make the game better and more enjoyable, and when does it detract from the enjoyment by making the game better? Soundbite answer, Charles. This is the lightning round question?

Oh, my gosh. And show all work. Compare and contrast. Here's the soundbite answer. The more science makes a game or a sport fun, the more it's good. If you try to put anything into a sport or a game that makes it less fun, whether it's, you know, steroids or unfortunate training or whatever, or science, it'll make it less fun, whether it's, you know, steroids or unfortunate training or whatever, or science, it'll make it less fun. But if we can add the science and say, look, this makes the game more

fun, which science does, if you do it right, then we have no problem. Okay. I'll give you the answer. The athlete's answer is this. Does this give me an advantage? Can I win? Let's have it. Yeah. I'm in for winning. Well, there you go. Okay. We're all of the age when we remembered when the electronic, I think IBM was the first to do with the electronic tracking of whether a tennis ball hits the line in or out.

All right. That's science applied to a sport. Did that make it more or less fun? I think it made it more fun. Unless you're Yvonne Lendl or John McEnroe, right? Unless you liked watching them argue. Yeah, right. Oh, that's so funny.

John McEnroe nowadays would be, what are you? What are you, blind? Shut up, John. Shut up. The computer said it's out. Yeah, I may be blind, but the computer isn't. So get the hell back on the phone.

The computer said no. Okay. All right. Next. Keep it coming. This question is from Stay Punk-tual. How do pro basketball players... From what?

Instagram? This is Instagram. Sorry. Okay, Stay Punk-tual. How do pro basketball players have muscle memory or to make seemingly impossible shots? have muscle memory or to make seemingly impossible shots? Well, I would say that it's probably practice, practice, practice.

Muscle memory is a thing, although it's not physically a thing so much. Your brain actually can pattern in things that it's done before, whether it's in sports or in arts or music or science or anything like that. So if you do it over and over enough times, then your body knows at that moment what to do, what combination of signals to send from your brain to your body to get those things to happen. And then there's also the point where you have improvisation. If you have different sequences in your head already set, you know how to take a shot and you know how to spin and you know how to dunk, then you can combine them together if your brain has done it often enough, almost instantaneously to a jump and a spin and a dunk all in sequence. Cool. So what you're saying is I don't have to invent a new sequence. I just have to staple together other fragments of the sequence that I've already perfected and to everyone else, it'll look like it's something new. Well, that's my understanding of the sports physics of the brain. Uh, but you know, new,

new understanding about how our brains and our bodies work is coming every day. So I may be already way behind on the curve. Cool. Cool. And like that scene where, uh, where, uh, Michael Jordan is at the, at the foul line and he just closes his eyes and shoots. Yeah. And then it's a complete, it's all net. I would call that muscle memory. I would call that. Or magic, one or the other.

All right, let's keep this going. We're in lightning round. Go. Here we go. Get a Patreon. This is Tyson Liu, 2019. Oh, interesting. Oh, wow. So he says, hockey skates, blade contact. Are we actually on the ice or are we on a layer of water? What is it?

Good question. It turns out that it's complicated. It can be either or both. There's been a long-held belief that the reason you wind up being able to skate is because temporarily the ice skate pushes against the ice and creates a thin layer of water as it goes by. But it's more complicated than that. If you do the physics, that alone usually isn't enough. So surface physics is a part of physics, which we haven't done a really good job in understanding the models thereof. So it's a combination of solid on solid and liquid on solid.

And that's why it's such a dicey thing to do when you're playing hockey or when you're doing figure skating. It's not always the same physics that's causing your skate to move. And therefore you have to adjust physically with your muscles to make sure that you're going where you want to go. Wow. Okay. All right. This is from Instagram, Jeff Califat. What happens when a basketball seems to enter the hoop but suddenly rolls out? I'll tell you what happens. I lose $200. Thanks, LeBron.

Thanks. Thanks, LeBron. Well, the ball is always spinning, even if you can't see it on television. So if it hits the rim, it's going to strike at instantaneously at a particular angle. And there's a spin happening at the same time. It is altogether possible, but very unfortunate for Chuck, right? You hit the spin and the rim in just such a way that the reflection angle from that bounce is actually out as opposed to being in. So that's kind of what happens. So Charles, this is like if I take a ball and I backspin, take a basketball and I backspin it away from me.

If you're just standing and you don't see the spin, it looks like I'm throwing it away, but then it bounces back towards me. So you can create a bounce trajectory that's very non-intuitive if you don't know in advance how the thing is spinning. That's right. Wow. Very cool. So it can't go in the net and come out of the net.

That's not the kind of shot that we're talking about here. It's got to be able to... The rim is a participant. It's got to hit the rim. It's got to hit the rim in order for it to come back out. Almost certainly, yes. The net is not strong enough to provide that reflective balance. Strong enough to repel it.

Okay, cool. Cool, man. All right, keep it coming. This is DiGoat93 from Instagram. I love this question. As somebody who has tried to surf, notice operative word, tried, he says, what is the force that keeps you on your surfboard? Oh, that's not so much force as it is balance,

right? Equilibrium. In order to stay still in any reference frame, in this case, the frame of your board, you have to have all your forces balanced to zero in all the other directions. Otherwise, you tip, right? So you're using micro adjustments of your body, your arms, your legs, your feet, your toes in such a way that... Your ass, right. Well, when I'm surfing, that is true. Such that if there is a change in the motion of the board, you are exactly balancing that almost instantaneously so that relative to the board, your position and your forces stay constant. So if you're unfamiliar with surfing, it just looks like they're just casually balanced, but you're saying there are micro adjustments that I don't even notice.

Incredible muscle power needs to happen in order for this to go on. It is true that I am told, I've never successfully done this myself, that the best surfers are one with their board, which means that they, at some point, need to make almost no adjustments because they intuitively sense where they need to be at any given time with the minimum adjustments necessary to have a zero net force

compared to the position of the board. Because if there's any force that is net, that will set the whole thing into motion and you'll tip over. You'll spin, you'll fall, you'll tip. Right. Wow. Very cool. That's so cool. The Silver Surfer. The Silver Surfer stayed

on because of the power cosmic given to him by Galactus to be his first herald. But that again is a different story. I set him up up you knock him down fantastic 448 you got to go back to the to the historical record fantastic and one thing about the surfer could it be then that if the surfer goes on with hand weights that they would have higher ability to make adjustments because they have more weight that they can maneuver so that they could survive a wave action that might otherwise

topple them like like a tightrope artist with a balancing for example very good chuck yeah very possibly i i don't know enough about the specific physics the non-linear physics when you're actually riding a wave to know whether that's an advantage or a disadvantage. But theoretically, it certainly makes sense. We should find – Yeah, if you have more weight, you can reposition. That should give you more. That's interesting.

The future of surfing is you get two dumbbells, two weights. Or you find some weighted gloves. Yeah, weighted gloves, weighted sleeves. Somebody has weighted gloves or weighted sleeves in their wetsuit, and they could cheat. Okay, so stay with this theme, okay, because Cooper Holland has come in on Instagram. This might have to be the last question.

All right, it's cool. Does being heavier on skis make you faster? Ooh. Fat skiers, watch out olympics well let me think about that a little bit on the one hand a higher mass would cause a greater normal force which would mean that you or if you have a coefficient of friction that's greater than zero it will slow you down going down the slope right on the other hand if you have a coefficient of friction that's greater than zero, it will slow you down going down the slope, right? On the other hand, if you have a higher mass, you may be able to tilt yourself a little bit more

so that you have less normal force and more parallel force heading down. That's probably an ambiguous answer. It could go either way. There's also, Chuck, if you plow through snow going forward, if you have more momentum from your heavier body, you'll go through that. Because in rowing,

if you're going to bet on what boat is going to win and you have no other information, bet on the heaviest boat. Because the heaviest boat, between strokes the boat slows down because of friction with the with the water right but if a heavier boat it will slow down less right and so no neil is exactly right if if if you treat the snow as a viscous

medium that's providing resistance to your motion you would want more mass but mostly most of the time ski slopes are groomed. And so there isn't a lot of loose snow blocking you. So instead you're just worried about the friction. Okay, so it's not an obvious clean answer there. That's right. And just to make it clear, fat people and skinny people will fall at the same rate in free fall. Okay, so it's not like you're fat, you'll fall faster than if you're skinny.

That's why I'm on the Galileo diet. It don't make a difference what I eat. When I fall, I'm still going to... Because he did the experiment with the Leaning Tower. Just don't jump off the Leaning Tower. Peace. Drop something else off the Leaning Tower. All right, guys, we've got to call it a quiz.

We should do this again. This is fun, and people are totally in it from our fan base. Charles Liu, always great to have you. Thank you so much for having me. It was such a pleasure. It's great to see you guys. And we love your COVID rock star hair. Thank you.

Hey, next time maybe we'll have even more of it to discuss. Yeah, but then we've got to start a band or something. Gary, always good. And you're a good sport when I make fun of your vintage. Hey, look, it is what it is, dude. We're going to carbon date me as soon as these mugs come off. We'll do that. We'll report that on the next episode.

Chuck Nice, always good to have you. Always a pleasure. Neil deGrasse Tyson, as always, bidding you to keep looking up.