StarTalk Radio - Game-Changing Physics

Episode Date: January 29, 2021

How do you change the game? Neil deGrasse Tyson, co-hosts Gary O’Reilly and Chuck Nice, and astrophysicist Charles Liu investigate game-changing techniques used to re-shape sports in the first episode of our mini-series. NOTE: StarTalk+ Patrons can watch or listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: https://www.startalkradio.net/show/game-changing-physics/ Photo Credit: Fernando Frazão/Agência Brasil, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. 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, and we've got a really juicy topic today. We're talking about game changers in their athletic events by having introduced a technique that was without precedent, thereby changing the game. So I've got with me, as usual, my co-host, Chuck Nice. What's up, Neil? All right, good. And you're here at Fort Levity because you've never done any professional sports. I've never done anything professionally. You're here for levity because you've never done any professional sports. I've never done anything professionally.

Any sports at all. Period. So just to manage expectations of the audience. And we've got Gary O'Reilly. Of course, Gary, we love you, man. Love you too, Neil. All right, all right. We stole you from the UK where you were a soccer pro and a soccer announcer, and now you're helping us here with StarTalk.

Yeah, and when I played professional soccer, I did on occasion make people laugh, but that's another story. For a reason. And a whole other cause of humor than anything Chuck Nice would be giving us. So here's what we're going to do. This is the first in a sort of a mini-series, sort of a subset of StarTalk Sports Edition, where we're going to include a salute to science and technology.

Okay? And it's how these things have come to bear on sports that were long traditional but then were transformed simply in the presence of clever technique clever technologies and innovative science and for this particular show we've got my friend and longtime colleague charles lu charles hi neil good to see you and as people who know you know you from this show You've got my friend and longtime colleague, Charles Liu. Charles. Hi, Neil. Good to see you. And people who know you from this show, you're our resident, how do we call it? Geek-in-chief.

Geek-in-chief. You're our geek-in-chief. Because on the geek spectrum, you know, I fancy myself on the geek spectrum, okay? I'm there. And I'm, but what we know about. You're in the visible light part of this. You're in the visible light part of this. You're in the visible light part. Because, because the interesting thing about geekdom is no matter how geeky you think you are, the scale just keeps going beyond.

And you'll come up with something that you're proud of. And someone just walks in, knocks on the door and say, no, you missed out episode seven in the third comic book of the second. And it's like, dang. And all you can do is stand in awe, as we all do for you, Charles Lewis. By the way, that's also true for opera, just so you know. Is that right? Yeah. You just proved our point, Charles.

You can't help yourself. You just proved the whole point Charles. You can't help yourself. You just proved the whole point. Opera books are amazing. You can pull out like one Italian phrase in some opera written in 1864 by somebody that you've never heard of, and you just thought you were really good at it, and you're just not. No, you're just not because somebody else just throws down on top of that. See, we just found out like on the on the spectrum, Charles is gamma ray.

Gamma ray. That's what Charles is on the spectrum. That's as high as energy on the spectrum as you can get. Oh, God. So, Charles, you are a, you're my co-author on more than one project. You were around as one of our chief scientists when we built the Rose Center for Earth and Space. You go way back.

You're now on the faculty. Are you now dean or something? You got some highfalutin academic title at the... Just a professor, just a professor. Okay, you're just a plain old professor, okay? And you have physics in the Department of Physics there? Physics and Astronomy. Physics and Astronomy at the College of Staten Island at the City University of New York, and that's in arm's reach of us, which wouldn't be

necessary in COVID times, but when we have you in studio, that helps because we call on you often. So what we want to do, we want to to introduce I'm going to go in sequence here. We have several athletes that we're profiling in a good way. Charles. Charles overreacts any time something like that. We're profiling Simone Biles. And you say, why are you always going to say that?

I was about to react. I'm like, I'm not a big fan of profiling. That's all I'm saying. That's all I'm saying, too. Okay, so she's the reigning and undisputed queen of world gymnastics. Okay? And she has more world championship medals than any other gymnast. And so here's what she did. on difficulty and technique while basically gracefully demonstrating

how physics can be exploited to annihilate your opponents, okay? Physics, don't argue with physics because physics is going to show up and it's either going to help you or knock you out of competition. So why don't we start out? I have a clip of her. In 2019, U.S. Gymnastics Championships, where she made history by being the first woman to land a triple double in her floor routine. Let's hear this commentary from, was this NBC? NBC sports announcers

giving commentary on what they witnessed. Let's check this out. It is unreal and as well done as anybody, man or woman, has competed in. And here we go, right off the bat, the very first tumbling pass. Triple twisting, double back. Money! Just keep making history, Simone Biles. Well, so, first, Charles, how does a human body do this?

What's going on here? And could it be that she's 4'8"? I mean, I don't remember many 6' gymnasts of any gender. So what's going on here? Well, as always, it's gravity and rotation that makes the difference. Gravity restricts the amount of time Simone has in the air to perform the stunts and the techniques. But that's true for everybody. So don't be telling me that it's helping her in some way. Well, if she can push harder and get higher, then she can have longer to do her work.

Hang time. That's the hang time. The hang time. Gymnastic hang time. Right. Rotation is the other aspect. She's doing both a twist and she's doing a roll or flip, right? So she has to be able to torque her body in two different axes at the same time.

Triple twisting, double flip, right? It is truly an amazing combination. Well, let's just unpack this. So in physics, you learn about rotation, right? So a wheel turns and there's one axis and the equations related to that, but she's not turning on just one axis here. That's right.

So she has to minimize her rotational inertia or moment of inertia, as it's sometimes called, in two axes at once. And we have a hard time thinking about that, but we'll get to figure skating later, I think. But if you watch a figure skater start a spin, they'll start with their arms out. And then as they pull their arms in closer and closer to the centers of their bodies, their spinning goes faster and faster and faster. That has to do with the conservation of angular momentum, just as you described. In order for Simone to be able to twist three times and flip twice while you're big, it's really hard to compact yourself in every dimension that you can in order to do the rotation.

I don't know if I've ever seen Shaquille O'Neal do a floor routine. That would be nice. That's amazing. That would be awesome. Yeah, so Shaquille O'Neal accepted here, just in this example. Do we really want to see Shaq do a floor routine? Really? I was just, I closed my eyes and I said no, no, no.

Exactly. I think at the end it wouldn't be a floor, right? I was going to say the first thing is, the first thing you do is a series of craters. Crater routine. There you go. The crater routine. So, Charles, for an ice skater, because the friction is so low between them and the ice, as they're spinning, they can spin faster.

And obviously, if you're in midair, there's no friction to speak of between you and the air. So you get to spin faster in the same way the figure skaters do. Whereas if I'm just standing on the ground and I pull my arms in, I don't end up spinning faster because the friction stops me. You do actually, Neil. I don't feel it. Shaquille O'Neal could do that. No, I'm saying if I'm standing on the ground.

Sometime ask Shaquille, okay, maybe on his tippy toes, to swing around with his arms open. Oh, ballet style. Yeah, and pull the arms in, and you will spin faster.ille, okay, maybe on his tippy toes, to swing around with his arms open. Oh, ballet style. Yeah, and pull the arms in, and you will spin faster. Yeah, okay. You'll stop really quickly because of the friction, but you still will go faster for a short period of time. So Simone Biles has to do this in two axes. So the twisting and the…

So do you want those axes to come together? Like so that, what are they called? Like those, oh man, like a gyroscope? What are those things called? Well, gyroscopic effect is you've dispersed very, very fast. So this is not exactly what we're talking about, but the spinning is still the same, right? The concept is the same.

If you're spinning along one axis and you're spinning along another axis, ideally, right, the axis of rotations, if they intersect, right, you want that to be the same spot whichever direction you're going to minimize the amount of torque you need to go

in either direction. Whoa! So what you're saying is, if you manage to spin in two axes, but they, but those two axes will intersect only in one spot. So what's wrong with that? Of course, to say they intersect in the same spot, if they intersect, they intersect. That is the spot.

So what are you saying? Right. So what I'm saying is let's say you— Okay, by the way, when Charles says that's a good point, that means he says he was wrong. Okay? Thanks, Neil. You are assuming that the axes are on the same plane, right? When you have two lines on the same plane, they must intersect at a single point in nuclear geometry.

But I'm thinking in three dimensions, which means that you might be offset. Okay, my bad. You have to do this and do that. I just got out of geek there. Right. So if it's two different planes. You're admitting that you might be offset. Okay, my bad. You have to do this and do that. I just got out of geek there. Right. So if it's two different planes. You're admitting that you're wrong? Yes, I'm admitting that I'm wrong.

Not only being wrong, but being wrong saying you're wrong. Hey, man, don't mess with those gamma ray geeks. Don't mess with those gamma ray geeks. Right. So, Charles, where is she getting all of this energy to perform this and get her hang time? Because when she does her flicks, she doesn't seem to have her hands in contact with the floor

for any length of time, and it's not as if she's taking a 100-yard run-up to get the speed up. Well, she does take a run-up to get to the corner. Right. It's only like half the diagonal length of the corner. Right. It's only like, you know, one half the diagonal length of the floor. But in addition, the spring action that she gets off the ground has to come from her muscle power, mostly from her lower body, but even from her upper body, she can produce a little bit by swinging her arms or otherwise lifting the upper carriage of her body.

And that vertical push is so important. If you get your body up two feet off the ground to go from up and back down again, you have about seven tenths of a second here on earth's surface. If you can get four feet off the ground, you have a full second. And if you get six feet off the ground, you have 1.2 seconds, give or take. If I can get my body six feet off the ground, I am using a ladder. There's a crane and a grapple hook. I'm going to walk to the edge of a six foot high ledge. That's how I get up, 2.6 feet off the ground. There's no vertical way for me to do

it. But if you look at her video of how high she gets with that spring, she looks like she gets at least four feet off the ground. I wouldn't be surprised if it were closer to six feet. And you can time the time that she leaves the floor to the time she hits the floor again. Well, you know, she's four feet eight. You know, she's four feet eight, so it looks like she leaps higher than, not to the bottom of her feet, but when she's tumbling forward, it looks like she's easily arcing higher than her own height. Yeah.

That's what it looks like to me. That's right. And so every fraction of a second gives her that much more time to complete a twist or a flip. So it's a tremendous physical activity. So it might mean that the future of floor exercises in competitors is to continue to improve that hang time. It just gives you more time to do things to get points forward. That's right. What is the acceleration you can get off the ground before you perform your mid-air activities?

Smaller gymnasts have that advantage, but the smaller you are, possibly the less muscle mass you have, and thus the less power you can generate when you leap. And so it's a trade-off, and technique is so important in this case, I'm sure, because of the balance of those two competing characteristics. Well, I've got one more. I've got another clip here. Speaking of technique, there's the one and only Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, right? And I'd sat down with him a couple of years ago, and we chatted about what became the most lethal basketball shot in the NBA. And by the way, of course, he's six-time NBA champion,

six-time MVP. But he hasn't played for like 32 years, but his point total, career point total, is still unsurpassed after 32 years, a third of a century, people. So, and some people remember him as starring opposite Bruce Lee in the movie. Game of Death. Game of Death. Game of Death, my favorite moment.

Charles knows this. Told you. So my favorite moment is when he kicks Bruce Lee in the chest. Because Bruce Lee is a tiny man. And Bruce Lee looks and there's a huge footprint on his chest. Footprint on the chest, absolutely. And, of course, he was wearing that bright neon jumpsuit at that time. Yeah, so it was totally, it was all there.

So the question in my conversation with him was, what does he even understand of his own about the skyhook that he pioneered? Check it out. What percent of your 38,000 points were skyhook points, would you guess? I'd say three quarters. Three quarters? Yeah. Ooh. But, you know, I learned, everything I learned, you know, had to do with learning the mechanics of the shot

and shooting a bow and arrow. Because you figure out what the drop is all about, you know, what the arc is all about. And once you got that figured out, you can, you become a accurate you're a marksman at that point so you're a basketball marksman you have to be well if you're going to be successful you know and i i led the league in field goal percentage a number of years i think that was really my success to you know i had a successful shot that they couldn't block that That's what enabled me to endure. What's intriguing about this hook shot,

I think Bill Bradley famously was quoted saying that in the hook shot, because he also did the hook shot, the hook shot, your eyes are not on the ball or on your hand or anywhere near your arm. No. So that there's a sense of where the basket is relative to the ball if you have enough experience on the court so you don't actually need to look at where the basket is and you must agree with

that because you were successful in a cook shot you don't have to know where the ball is you gotta keep your eye on the basket but you don't have to have your eye on the ball okay but that requires some musculoskeletal connectivity. Yes. That's why you practice. That's the quote of the interview. That's why you practice. Musculoskeletal.

I just like it. You know, the person scores 32,000 points. Yeah, just keep your eye on the basket, and the ball finds the... He's casually talking about this. And this is extreme high precision accuracy of that shot and his talent. So, Charles, we didn't mention the fact that he happens to be 7'2". So how good is he on an uneven parallel bar? Chuck, you can't shake the image of Shaq out on the...

I just want to see a basketball player do gymnastics now. So, Charles, he's almost shooting down at the basket. That's right. Well, part of the reason the skyhook was so devastating was that if he lifts his arms up and jumps vertically, the ball at the top of the arc is above the level of the rim. And so he's able to drop the ball in such a way that the cross section that the ball has on the way down is maximized. And nobody can defend against him because according to the rule, you can't block the ball on the way down. You cannot block the ball if it's on the way down. Oh, my gosh. That's right.

Because then it's, what's it called if you do that? It's goaltending. It's goaltending. Right. And it's an automatic basket. So if Kareem is doing the sky hook, unless he misses, nobody can defend against him. That's why it was the only shot in basketball to be determined an indefensible shot because the only way you can get to it

is to block it while it's basically at his hand, which I think is- It's still in his hand. It's only been done once. Yeah, you just have to jump 10 feet up to do that. You know, while he's doing it. That's all. Yeah.

Now, Michael Jordan's fadeaway jumper was also claimed to be indefensible, but for a different reason. He created space while he was shooting. But somebody who was like nine feet tall could theoretically have stopped that shot. But for Kareem, it was literally not allowed. Wow.

So did players stop being seven foot two? No, he was taller. Right. Did the physics change? And why on earth don't we still see the skyhook in the NBA? Because you now have Steph Curry, who has raised an entire generation of kids who want to shoot the ball from their bedroom. Because that was cool.

And get all net along the way rule changes rule changes and style changes are the only reason i think that it's not uh fashionable anymore aside from the fact that kareem was a as you described neil a remarkable uh human uh in terms of musculoskeletal things going on right right i don't know if anybody has that sign of hand-eye coordination where you don't even have to look at the ball to drop it into the hoop from a distance. The three-point shot now is statistically more devastating than

any two-point shooting, unfortunately. If you're good at it. If you're good at the three points. And the thing is, though, three, I forget who said this, three always beats two. Three is greater than two.

Three is great. Thank you, Chuck, for that little bit of arithmetic for this show. Guys, we've got to take a quick break. We've got to take a quick break. When we come back, more in our exploration of athletic greatness as measured by who has changed the game just by their very existence. We're back.

Star Talk Sports Edition. I've got with me our resident geek and chief, and you know who that is, Charles Blue. Then you woke up. I give you the crown gary go for it it's not to be taken from you sir of course we got gary and chuck we're talking about athletic greatness that manifest not simply by how hard they work but what technique they

might have perfected and we can't have a show like this without talking about the 1968 mexico city olympics a lot of interesting things happened there not the least of which was bob beeman breaking the long jump world record by more than a foot by more than a foot and that was he didn't just lightly beat his own record he smashed his own record and every other jump that had ever made so interesting things happened in those olympics and i remember that i was old enough to to to remember them uh mexico city it was it was at high altitude and all this but for the purposes of this show we're going to talk about Dick Fosbury. He's a high jumper, and he won the gold medal going backwards over the bar when everyone before

him had gone forwards over the bar. And it looks like he just flops backwards into the cushion, and it became known as the Fosbury flop. So we've got this clip of an announcer sort of introducing the viewer to Dick Fosbury's innovative technique, and it's got this very period flavor to it. Check it out. An amazing and amusing champion is Dick Fosbury. Here seen psyching himself to a winning pitch. And another gold medal.

What's that again, Dick? Unorthodox, perhaps, but kids all over the world are sure to be trying the famous Fosbury flop. God, I love you. It's just amazing how you can tell this is what you had to sound like in order to be an announcer back then. That was you needed that announcer voice? What's that? Gary, did people sound like that in UK sports broadcasting too, back in the 60s?

Language is the same, the accent's slightly different. So it was very formulaic. We've copied. So Charles, tell me, why does this work and why does everyone do it now? Well, two key things. People used to go forward or backward over the bar, right? If you jump backwards or sideways, there was a scissors kick technique where you actually could get slightly higher kick off, some felt, going backwards or sideways than going forward. But what Fosbury did was go over backwards, but bent. He never needed to bring his entire center of mass

over the bar. All he had to do was to make sure that every part of his body was over the bar for at least a brief moment. And so he could fluidly go over backwards and because the legs could hang down low, he didn't have to produce as much upward power. And then he could land with a flop on his back and his head. So what you're saying is if you go over backwards, your legs dangle at your knees, that creates part of an arc and any good athlete is flexible bending backwards, right? And so he makes like a semicircle out of his body going backwards and then curls over the bar. That's right. But what you're telling me, all of us, is that he took his center of mass outside of his body. Basically, right. Think of a U-shape, right? If you have a bar and it's straight, the center of mass is in the middle. But if you make a U shape, the center of mass is kind of down in the middle of the U.

So if you're going over it the whole time compared to the bar, you're a U shape, then your center of mass rides below the bar at all times. You know, the funny thing is you would think this would be intuitive because he's really just following the natural curve of the human body from our spine all the way down to our ankles our body curves that way right if you were to go forward at some point the curve stops at your thigh because your knees don't bend. They don't bend the other way. They bend forward. So you would think somebody would have thought of this before him. Do you know what, Chuck?

If you introduce thicker matting into the equation, which it came around around about that sort of time, you can exercise that technique. If you've got nothing but sand to jump into over a bar, your landing's quite brutal. That's an excellent point. The technology or the rule change that allowed a mattress, right, Gary? I mean, before this, people landed on a sort of, like you said, a sandpit or a thin mattress or something. But once they created those really springy, thick things, you didn't mind hitting the back of your head every time you landed.

And so maybe people thought of it before, but they said, I actually want to keep on going. So the guy who actually thought of it got brain damage. Thought of it and did it. He did it, got four concussions, forgot who he was, and the technique was temporarily lost. All right, so Charles, the world record now for men's, Sotomayor from Cuba. Yeah. All right, it's eight feet and a quarter inch. Amazing.

That is huge. And the women's record, Kostadinova from Bulgaria, six feet, ten and a quarter inches. Wow. This is, I can't even imagine this. But let me ask you, is there, of course, they're all doing the Fosbury flop. Is there some bit of physics that we're waiting to be invented to make a brilliant leap in these numbers?

Jetpack. Or is the Fosbury flop the physics limit of this event? Was the Fosbury Flock the physics limit of this event? Well, I imagine that there could be technique further developed in the future that allows you to go higher without producing more power. And that might require a human being adapting, training in a different way,

different muscles, something like that. Okay, so a different leaping technique. Right. And every time people say, oh, we've reached a limit, you can't do any better. Somebody eventually breaks that limit. So it would be foolish for me to speculate whether we've reached the top. Okay. Let's join two of our game changes together here. What if I got myself that six-foot gymnast and made them do a floor routine run-up and get them up and over the bar? Oh, interesting.

That would be amazing. And then the landing would have to be really far, right? And then do that huge jump. I think that would be a really interesting thing to try. Probably be against the laws of the event, but I'm interested to see if that experiment works. Rule changes would make a great point, Gary. Just like the three-point play put the sky hook into the back burner of basketball.

So let's move on to our next example here. It's Edwin Moses, keeping in the track and field theme, a double Olympic gold medalist. And he had a winning record of nine years, nine months, and nine days. Wow. Who even calculates that? And his event was the 400-meter hurdles. But that's not even what I like most about him. He was a physics and engineering major at Morehouse College. Yes.

Oh, yeah. Geek in the house. All right. And so I interviewed him recently for an earlier version of StarTalk Sports Edition. But now there's a clip that has special relevance for this show. So check it out. All I had to do was teach myself how to run the hurdles 35 meters apart. And the first time I did it, I found myself running 13. I found myself using my left leg, which is the inner leg. 13 strides between 13 steps. Yeah. Running closer to the curve. And then I figured out that if I run eight inches away from the inner line, which is where they measure the lane versus, you know, two or three feet in the middle

of the lane, I'm saving three to four meters per race, which is like 15 feet, anywhere from 12 to 15 feet. So that was the first adjustment I made. Wait, wait, Edwin, are you saying the effective length of your path, because you start out in blocks, right? Right. And of course you have to stay in your lane because you were hurt all the way around. So the length, the actual 400 meters is not the center line of the width of your lane? Eight inches. Eight inches from the inner line. I didn't know that. Eight inches from the inner line.

So my endeavor was to run as close to the inner line as I could. Whereas most people just run all over the lane. And by doing that, I calculated the radius of the track and figured it out that I was saving three to four meters per race. So that's 12, 15 feet. I was basically... That's a huge distance. Wow.

I just love the fact that Edwin Moses ran all those races with a ruler strapped to his foot. With a laser altimeter. Charles, talk me through this. So is it really that? I mean, I have to believe he did the calculation right, but can I get a backup verification of that from you? Let's do some real-time math, shall we? If we approximate the oval track as a circle and the 400 meters is all the way around,

the circumference of anything is 2 pi r, where r is the radius. So, you're going around the whole track once, 2 pi r. Now if r happens to be, say, 3 feet less or 2 feet less, in this case it's like 1.5 feet less, right? So it's 2 times pi times 1.5 feet. 2 pi is 6. So 1.5 times 6 something is about 9 or ten feet.

He got it bang on. So what we're saying is he ran a shorter race. Right. He did. That's it. I mean, think about it. Ten feet is considered a massive advantage. Okay, so if he doesn't tell anyone this, and everyone's saying, oh my gosh, look at this amazing athlete, he's just smarter than everybody else.

Right. Well, yeah. I mean, all track people do know that in the end, you want to get on the inside, right? That people know. But the question is exactly how much Edwin was able to do the math, quite literally. And so this, for all of you kids listening,

you're like doing math and going, when am I ever going to use this crap? It's for your double gold medal. That's right. When you're undefeated for nine years, nine months, and nine days. But another thing that you should note in here is what he said, the 13 steps. In his day, very few people could even do 13. Most people struggled at 15. And the more you touch the ground, the more you slow down, right? If you stay in the air more, so if you only touch the ground 13 times between hurdles, you have a distinct advantage over people who are

15 times touching the ground. Is this true, Charles, for the embarrassingly obvious fact that whenever you're touching the ground, you're not moving forward? I mean, if your foot is in contact with the track, your foot is not moving forward. Correct. Your center of mass continues to move, but you will be moving a smaller distance if a piece of you is touching the ground just because of the friction. You're also, you're adding the vertical and the horizontal push, the force, every time you touch the ground.

That's how cheetahs run. Yeah, you could conceivably run with more power with each step. But Chuck, you're right. Cheetahs like take a step and they're like gliding through the air for a period of time. And they purposely elong take a step and they're like gliding through the air for a period of time. And they purposely elongate their body while they're in the air.

In the air. To cover more distance and so that they're touching the ground much less. Chuck, you're saying the cheetah did the math. That's what you're saying. Soccer players too, right, Gary? Soccer players do that. If you want to do a truly high-speed run, you are trying to take as few strides as possible

and make them long, right? Yeah, but if you have the ball, you need to still control the ball, and then it's the opposite. That's the alchemy, to be able to run with the ball as quick as you can run without it. That's why they say Messi is so great, because he doesn't have those long strides,

but he's so fast with the dribble. Uh-huh. Yep, absolutely. So, Charles, in the modern-day tracks, they use the tartan sort of rubber track that has a sort of a springiness to it. Tell me briefly about that. Briefly, because we've got some more we want to cover here. Well, the elasticity of that stuff is certainly very nice in being able to provide a little extra spring in your step every time you step down. But really that elastic stuff is to protect your ankles. More important than anything else, you want to keep the runners running for a

longer period of time in their lives. So they're like shock absorbers. So in a sense, you get an advantage, but everyone gets the same advantage because they're all running on the same track. But maybe you get an extra year or two in your career without pounding it hard on ask. Wait, wait, wait. So that's for, wait, wait. But a shock absorber absorbs shocks. If your energy that you use to squeeze it returns to you

with the material recovering its shape, then it's a shock helper in a sense. Right. And what it does is the parts of your body that need to compress, like your ankles, will compress and be able to come back out. You're reducing the impulse that your ankles are feeling because the amount of time of impact

is increased by that time it takes to squish. Do you know the other aspect to the vulcanized rubber, the Mondo track that they run on? You use shorter spikes. If they ran on cinders, the spikes had to be longer because they wanted grip. The grip means friction. The shorter spikes don't have as much friction.

And Moses said as soon as he ran in his first Olympics and he realized he was going to run on this rubberized track, he went game over. Wow. Everyone else is running for second place. Right, because my father, when he ran track, when I was a little kid and he still ran, I saw his cleats and spikes. And when the tartan tracks came in and other tracks of that nature, he was able to use the shorter spike. And the less time you've dug into the track, to your point, Charles, you want to minimize how much time you do in that.

Wow. Guys, we got another clip, but we ran out of time in this segment. Let's get to it in our Shoot the Shit segment. And we're going to talk about Sasha Cohen, the figure skater who did a quad jump. But like how, when, and where. We're back.

StarTalk Sports Edition, third segment, final segment. Usually we just shoot the shit here, but there was so much content, some of it spilled into this segment. Let's get straight to it. We're going to talk about the figure skater,asha cohen who's actually a friend of star talk she appeared in one of our live performances at the brooklyn academy of music and it was great to have her on stage and she still has bubbly energy and it was great just talking to her about her career and what she's doing now but let's let's pick up a segment from that conversation where we talk about how should

you break down the components of the quad jump let's check it out gave a brilliant description of how you give yourself rotational inertia okay for a jump we haven't even gotten to the spin but however you didn't well okay so i spin. But however, you didn't, well, okay. So to me, in physics, you generally break things apart into components and you put them all together for the one thing. I break this apart. You told me how you gain spin, but if you're going to do a quad, you have to be airborne long enough to complete the quad before you hit the ground.

Yes. That's part of it because you'll notice, if you've watched figure skating this past Olympics, you will see some people barely get off the ice and they can do three turns, and some people get this high up and they don't complete it. Two or three feet off the ice. So it really is the rotational spin.

It's how fast you launch yourself up. Gotcha. And then obviously it goes into what's your body type, do you have wide hips's how fast you launch yourself up. Gotcha. And then obviously it goes into like, what's your body type? Do you have like wide hips? How fast are you spinning? And that's why men rotate faster and generally do a lot more quads than women do. They spin faster, they've got narrower hips. But you know, women are more flexible, so we've got better spiral sequences. How many women have done quads? You know, a couple have done it in practice, and I feel like maybe one or two have done it in competition.

And you've done a quad? I have. A long time ago. A long time ago. Thankfully, YouTube exists, and it will always live there. I hope. I'll be like, wow, I used to do that. Now I just sit.

That's such great memories being on stage with her. So, Charles, so she said a lot of what you said earlier in this show, where you need the height, so the hang time to borrow from basketball. But she's also talking about the diameter, the hip diameter of men versus women. Why should that matter here? Right. Well, the wider you are compared to how tall you are, the greater your so-called moment of inertia is, and the more force you need in order to get yourself spinning. So a man's ratio of the width of the hip bones, the pelvis, to height is smaller than a woman's. On average, yeah. Yeah, I was going to say, because you just described the antithesis to my body type. Because I'm very hippie, but my hips don't lie. So I see what you did there so the speed that she was talking about right is very true because in

figure skating you can start your spin while you're still on the ice so you can create more torque so if you're speeding along and being able to translate more of that translational momentum into angular momentum as you lift off you don't have to get as high if you're already spinning quickly when you start your jump oh cool but this is this is the really fine line for me because if i go too fast i'm in trouble because every jump and chuck taught me this every jump has to land on one foot. Yeah. One skate. That's a rule, yes. Right.

So if I come too quickly, I have less chance of control. And I've really got to get this fine line. And I can imagine it's difficult if you think you're approaching that jump too quickly. You might bail out of it and just do a triple. There might be all sorts of in-event, just things that you feel. Adjustments. Yeah, that you feel in the moment

before you can do that, or you just say it's perfect. Yeah, so Charles, what do you say about someone who, let's say you can do it in practice, but in the heat of the moment, you make mid-course decisions regarding it? Yeah.

How common is that, do you think? It happens. There are athletes who can land quads in practice, but do not land quads in competition. Or others who, for example, have won many smaller events, world championships even, but in the Olympics have not won. On the biggest stage. Yeah, it's a combination of bad luck and some sports psychology, right? There's minute to minute or competition to competition. Your body's just a little bit different. The conditions might be a

little bit different. And then what your brain does to command your body to perform these physically very difficult acts can vary from one venue to the next. Because it's really remarkable, Charles. I don't think people pause and reflect on this often or deeply enough. But here I am training, right? And I'm doing my best. And I go in smaller contests. Then I go to a big stage, as is so often the case in the Olympics.

It's the biggest stage there is. And then you perform better than you ever did. Right. Well, how does that happen unless your brain took over at some point? Because your muscles, your speed, your coordination is performing in a way you have never seen. It's because you're an attention whore. No, no, no, no, no. Thank you for that analysis.

Yeah, no, it's just like, look about like you have us. It happens. But all I'm trying to say is that if your body could actually do that reliably, you would be doing it all the time, and the Olympics would just be another day in the park. But it's not. Okay, Neil, from the athletics. For those who do rise to the challenge,

it's got to be the brain, not the muscles. Yeah. That's all I'm saying. From my side of it, there are some people, you put them in the big game, their big game player arrives. Like Reggie Jackson being Mr. October. Yeah. And I think you're absolutely right when it becomes a mental aspect

because they didn't all of a sudden become the Hulk. This thing happened inside their mind and they just said, right, it's time to deliver. Whatever the best is, it's coming now. Right. Well, we all know that our brains control how much, say, adrenaline goes into our systems and allows our bodies to perform a little bit higher or lower. For some people, they—

Wait, wait, wait. So Charles, she just gave me an idea. So if at the beginning of a sprint race or anything, or at any race at all, you just have a monster chasing people. Yeah. And as a matter of fact, that's how usain bolt wins all his races right before uh they sound the gun he hears and uh he's actually there's a monster in his head chasing him right uh put put a like a cheetah behind everybody in the starting blocks and then go. That doesn't work because you know the old joke.

I don't have to be faster than the cheetah. I just got to be faster than you. Be faster than you. All right. So what we're agreeing upon here is the limits of your body can only actually be achieved in the limits of your mind. I love be achieved in the limits of your mind. I love that. Oh, the two of them are tied.

Oh, that's a quote. I love that. The two of them are tied closely together. I don't know if it's one way or the other that's more important, but certainly they are not independent. What you just said. I got to type that one down. That's a new T-shirt.

We got to get that. Getting that in a T-shirt. I heard this program i was driving once and i because i was driving i don't know the name of the program but it's taught it was talking about exactly what you just said and there's this bicycle race that lasts for like days and days like non-stop you don't get to stop. And this gentleman who participated in the race finished the race basically in a state of unconsciousness because he was pushing himself so hard

and his teammates were pushing him. But basically, it was all his brain that was doing everything. Okay, so that takes us back to the original marathon. Well, maybe. What's the original marathon? Well, as the story goes, you know, the runner who was sent back to Athens from marathon to report on the results of the battle, and he ran the whole way. I'm told in the legend he delivered the information and then dropped dead.

Oh! Yeah, that's too bad. So why didn't he drop dead one kilometer sooner, right? Right. Right? Because his brain carried him that extra day. Right. The brain carried him over.

And isn't it true, Charles, in China, that the death rate of citizens, senior citizens probably, is higher the week after the Chinese New Year than before? Possibly, yes. Or it could be just they ate too much. They partied down. It's interesting. And I think other holidays, it might be true, like Christmas and New Year's in the United States, right?

I mean, you came up with a great quote right now, but I think Yogi Berra said it just as well, or, you know, when he said that 90% of the game... Not Yogi Berra. Yogi Berra. Get your yogis straight here. When Yogi Berra... Thank you. What did I say? Yogi Berra. Oh. Hey, boo-boo. Guess what?

Okay, fine. Yogi Berra said... It ain't over till it's over. Boo-boo. Yogi Berra said, you should have the picnic basket. No, Yogi Berra said, 90% of the game is half mental. What a great quote. That's amazing.

Okay, so he flunked his math class. But he's in the Hall of Fame. He's in the Hall of Fame. He and Edward Moses have to duke it out. They've got to figure that one out. Charles, here's a thought for you. Is there any room left for innovation in sports technique? There is. Okay, there's my answer.

Do we have to go straight to machines and human genetic re… No, I don't think so. I mean, there are two aspects to this, right? One is individual activity. genetic no i don't think so i mean there are two aspects of this right one is um individual activity uh you guys remember the burkoff blast off yeah yeah this was a backstroker who figured out that if he did not surface from his first launch till he was more than halfway across the pool if he stayed a porpoise underwater dolphin kicked his way across half the pool. And he had a devastating advantage for a long time. And the world swimming competition body banned the move.

Yeah. Changed the rules because they felt that it was outside the scope of what the backstroke was supposed to be. Yeah, you're biased. But did they take away his medal? No, no. When they did that? No, they did not take away any of his awards. Okay, well, they could have done that with Fosbury.

That's right. And they could have said, no, you broke the rule, this mystical rule that we don't even know we've written yet. But they didn't. They kept it in. So is this just regressively thinking boards of these sports that won't allow innovation? You can argue that if you're underwater for so long,

you're not actually doing a backstroke, right? You're on your back, but you're not actually on the surface of the water. That's what they said. You're violating the spirit of the stroke itself. Right. It depends on each game and its root. But he's still on his back. It's rude.

Come on now. It really depends. You're not swinging your arms, though, right? So that means that's not a true backstroke. So he's still on his back. Didn't they ban Ryan Lochte as well for his innovation? What did he do? I think he did a similar thing, but he did it in the medley.

So he used a similar technique in the medley, and I think they put the kibosh on that as well. Yeah, it's possible that swimming just has different philosophical – philosophy about the rules compared to others, right? And then in team sports, of course, if you assemble a team of people with extra special skills or certain abilities, you have an infinite number of different innovations you can do. I think of the West Coast offense in football, for example, that was created by Bill Walsh in San Francisco 49ers with Joe Montana.

They basically created the offense that dominates what is in football today. When you had a quarterback that could throw the ball accurately across a wide range and just keep moving and keep moving, keep moving. And the hurry up offense in football, for example, had to be curtailed a little bit because the offensive team was getting such an advantage by not going to the huddle. So what you're saying, Charles, is we don't know what hasn't been invented yet that could innovate things that we think have gone stale because you need just someone clever to come along and rethink it. That's right.

So I think the answer to Gary's question is that innovation will always continue and it's all a matter of whether sport can keep up. And there'll always be someone there to say, no, you can't do that. Guys, we got to call it quits there, but this has been a very fun conversation. I'm glad we had those archival clips

to add to what we were talking about. And so Chuck, always good to have you. Always a pleasure. Tweeting at Chuck, nice comment. Thank you. And Gary, my three left feet. Yep. That'll be me.

That's your Twitter handle. Yep. That would be you. Okay. And Charles Liu, our resident geek in chief, you have never failed to impress us. Pleasure is mine. With everything you bring to the table. Thank you.

And that's why we keep you in arm's reach. Thank you so much. For just us. All right. And you had a book coming out, right? What was that? The answers in the... Space Travel is coming out.

And there's a children's, a baby's book about Newton's laws of physics. Oh, excuse me. Okay. Babies? Babies? Those are some smart babies. Yeah, well, amazing. What do you do?

You just throw it in the crib? You can measure the parabolic arc of the motion based on Newton's law of gravity. Nice. All right. Well, we'll have to talk about that one when that one arrives. Okay.

Guys, we call it a quits there. Thanks for this show. I've been your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist keep looking up