StarTalk Radio - #ICYMI - Ask a Sports Engineer, with David James

Episode Date: October 25, 2018

In case you missed this episode on the Playing with Science channel… Gary O’Reilly and Chuck Nice answer your questions and investigate the collision of sports, technology, and engineering alongside David James, sports engineer and Director of Photo Credit: The Center for Sports Engineering Research at Sheffield Hallam University.jonwick04 (https://www.flickr.com/photos/jonwick/4388363999/) [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/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.

I'm Gary O'Reilly and I'm Chuck Nice. Yes he is and this is Playing With Science. Today we only have the one guest. He's not a rock star, a film star or even a sporting legend but he is British so not only will he be splendid he will most likely live in a castle and have an army of butlers, just like everyone else does in Britain. Absolutely. I've heard that about you guys. It's true. Yes. Professor David James is, however, a sports engineer with enough published work to open his own library. He's also conducted research for sportswear giant, as Gary would put it, Adidas. Thank you. And worked with the world governing body of soccer, aka, I say this for you once again, football. Thank you.

Better known as FIFA. Yes. Along with many others. And last year he spoke at What Makes a World Champion seminar. So if that's what you are aiming for, then stick around. We will do our best to get the answer out of him

by hook or by crook. Also, we'll be answering questions of your own selection and making. So stick around. If you post some questions, we'll get the good professor to answer those as well. Best introduce him properly. We should indeed, especially since he's one of your countrymen and he's actually coming to us from his home in Sheffield. Fabulous. So director of the Center for Sport Engineering Research at Sheffield Hallam University and a man who has got involved in so many different things. It could take a series of shows to cover them all. So let's get straight into things. And so David James, welcome to Playing

with Science. So as we can all start on a firm footing, can you explain what it is you actually do? So I'm an engineer by training. So I started off life as a mechanical engineer. But what I do is I try and, I suppose, use technology, engineering techniques to improve sports equipment. I have a great team. We're an academic group. So we're in the Sheffield Highland University. I've got about 20 staff and about 20 PhD students. And we look at how we can use technology in sport. We use it to make athletes perform better. So we do loads of work with our Olympic teams, looking at all sorts of

aspects of technology in sports and the equipment that people wear, but also how we measure them, data, you know, intelligence around training, all sorts of different things, but it's all around technology. And we also look at how we can prevent injuries and actually make sport more accessible for people. So it's not just the elite, but actually how you can use design and innovation to encourage, you know, physical activity and participation in sport, which is a massive, massive issue, you know, for the health and happiness of our populations as well. I told you it was a series, didn't I? You've got your engineering tentacles in every single area of sport, no matter where it is yeah okay so do you design create and create

original features or are you one of those groups that kind of someone like adidas or any other body comes you said this isn't working as well as it should help yeah a bit of both a bit of both actually so um we do a lot of um sometimes we work before the design moment happens so we'll be so take what we do with adidas so we're trying to understand um how different players in say in soccer move differently on different surfaces whether they're playing on synthetic turf or natural turf or the new hybrid turf. And actually, what that does is that provides information for the design team to come up with products to best match the shoe with the movement on the surface.

So sometimes we do the very sort of fundamental research to give the ideas for the design work, figuring out, yeah, so how does this person move? What are they like? What are the conditions like? Equally, we also get involved sometimes when the product's being made and we test it to see, well, does it really work? Does it make any difference? You know, does it increase injury risk? Does it do these different things? So often we're about the ideas, the inspiration for the designs and the testing. And sometimes we do the design work ourselves as well, but actually companies are quite good at that. So as a university, we're more like the knowledge partner.

So I read that you guys worked with Amy Williams. She's a British skeleton, right? She's a gold medalist skeleton british skeleton in vancouver yeah and in winter olympics and she was like 143 uh kilometers per hour is what she hit as a top speed what did you guys do with her because i couldn't find exact i knew that i found that you were that you had worked with her but i couldn't find exact, I knew that, I found that you were, that you had worked with her, but I couldn't find what exactly did you do? This is an interesting story, this actually. So it's kind of amazing the, what Team GB, so Team Great Britain, how they've done very well in the Olympics in recent years.

Bearing in mind, in the Olympic Games inic games in atlanta the summer olympics we got just one gold medal um you know we were like bottom of the medal table and obviously in uh in rio you know we were second in the medal table did incredibly well and that that's a huge transformation so the whole high performance system has changed and technology has been a key part of that that story um in the Skeleton Bob, this one was actually a bit controversial because there are certain rules around what you can and can't do. And we kind of, you know, we push things right up to the limit of what the rules say you can do in terms of the design. I read that other teams of course usa because you know when

the usa loses they're just like something's terribly terribly wrong how is it that we we can't lose anyway um so not just team usa but a couple other teams were saying that there was a controversy surrounding her skin suit and that her skin suit gave her an unfair advantage how so so the rules on the skin suit weren't particularly clear uh they're a little bit ambiguous and we're open to debate about what you could and couldn't do but but essentially we had um it's kind of hard to describe but but the from the helmet we had part of her skin suit kind of, there's a bit of structure to her shoulders. So it kind of gave this nice profile from her head to her shoulders, which,

which provided a fantastic, well, you know, a small aerodynamic advantage. Right. And, um, he wasn't overly clear if that was allowed or not in the rules. Um,

and some of the teams didn't like it. Losing teams never like it. Let me just say this, uh, David Team USA bitched about that, that is the most un-American thing you could do, because there is nothing more American than taking ambiguous rules and using them to your advantage. that's what we do that's that's that's you know i believe in you know fair sport good competition but actually the modern world of sports you know pushing things to the limit uh within the rules is what is what you do right you're there to win you're not there to you know okay look i have quite strong feelings on this but but sport isn't a level playing field athletes get up in the morning to be better than their opponent they want to train harder get the right advice it's all about feelings on this but but sport isn't a level playing field athletes can get up in the morning to be better than their opponent they want to train harder get the right advice it's all about

getting an advantage and the modern sports person really has to you know think of the whole picture and push things to to the limit whilst not stepping over that limit what's your favorite project what's the favorite project for you that you've been involved in and found successful okay that's uh that's good actually i really like that so one of my favorite projects was um working on goal line technology oh gosh yeah with um with with fifa um that's been a great a great fun thing to do so um you know i've worked worked with FIFA helping them to basically decide whether goal line technology should be used in soccer. So this is a system which tracks where the ball is in a soccer match. And it basically tells the referee if it's a goal or not. So that's been a great project, actually.

And it's been really good to see a very sophisticated technology be introduced into the sport and actually change the culture of the sport because soccer has always been quite resistant to technology. And I think it's really changed now, actually. And that's been a great out to all other sports because if you think about the one thing that is common in all the sports is there's a human being who's making a judgment call about a ball did that ball go over the plate is it a strike or a ball did that ball actually cross the line is it a goal did that football break the plane? Is it a touchdown? So when you look at that, if you were to make that measurement so that there was no need of a referee, do you think that's a good thing for sports or a bad thing for sports?

Well, it's difficult, really. I some for some sports at the top top levels the the um frankly if you just look at the finance of it you know getting a decision wrong can cost hundreds of millions of pounds yeah and it's it's really it's you know it's fundamentally unfair i think to have the decision that's that's wrong be implemented because it can totally change people's futures. Whole cities can be affected by that if your team goes up or goes down. That's got massive implications. Some decisions are so important, they just have to be right. And you can see that in World Cups as well. Maybe the money's not so important, but it's a massive,

massive thing. You have to get it right. So I think for that, I think technology has a very good role to play. However, the concern is that technology comes at a price and a cost. And actually, at the lower levels of the sport, they might not ever be able to afford this. And so what that can do is it can actually pull the sport apart a little bit. You have different rules for the elite to sort of everyone else. And that's the challenge because the idea is that someone who plays football or baseball,

they're playing the same sport as their idols, the pros. So it should be one sport, not different forms of sport for different structures of the game. So that's the real challenge. But technology is getting cheaper. Camera technologies, mobile technologies, computer technologies, it's all getting cheaper. And as the systems get more developed and you get more companies in the game, prices will come down.

So hopefully it will become more open to everyone. Maybe the two of you can explain something to me because you just said like whole cities, their fate can be determined. Now, we're not used to this here in america okay and i just found this out this weekend um that when a soccer team or football team like okay let's say manchester united or you know crystal palace whoever when they win or lose they can go up or down in standings that can get them put in or kicked out of a league. Yeah. Oh, my God.

This is insane. Who knew this? I'm telling you. So in football, it's completely socialistic. Okay. You can lose every single game and you are still in the NFL. It's called the Cleveland Browns. That's correct.

So how does this work? Oh, man, it's frightening. Professor, if you don't mind, you start August, you end in May. In May, if you finish in the bottom three of the Premier League history, you get relegated to the division below. Oh, my God. This is what the professor means when he to the division below. Oh my God. This is what the professor means when he says whole cities. Oh my God. And you know, if you lose one game, well, okay. You

don't, you don't like it, but you get onto the next one. But if you've been so bad and you're finishing that bottom three, you're out of here. Now you can imagine that in a world cup. It's not just a city or a club, right? It's a whole country. Can you imagine if it got robbed of a world cup it's not just a city or a club right it's a whole country oh can you imagine if it got robbed of a world cup in the final oops uh so it's the the way the once you drop that pebble in the pond the ripples can be enormous wow such ramifications wow and so i think i think it's interesting the the um you know this i And so I think it's interesting, I mentioned about cities. So it's interesting in the UK that a really good sort of soccer team can really put your city on the international map. So, you know, when I travel around the world, I say I'm from Sheffield.

People say, well, where's Sheffield? And I say, oh, it's next to Manchester. And a lot of people know about manchester because they know about manchester united and manchester city pretty much anywhere i go in the world you know it's really um you know throughout africa and all over people oh yeah i know manchester manchester manchester and so it really affects the the standing or or how people view your city so it has it has very deep profound effects these these decisions and being in the premier league puts you in that top flight so you have two big soccer teams sheffield united

sheffield wednesday don't ask me about the wednesday sheffield wednesday yes um is that anything like taco tuesday we'll talk um then you have the sheffield steelers which is a hockey team then you have the don valley stadium whichers, which is a hockey team. Then you have the Don Valley Stadium, which is track and field. I'm not sure about basketball, but I'm thinking there is one. So it's known as the Steelers. Thank you, Sheffield Sharks. So you've got a lot of sporting excellence in this area, as well as the good professor.

And he doesn't have an army of butlers. He has a team, an army of PhD. Yes, an army of butlers. He has a team, an army of PhD. Yes, an army of PhD students. I mean, he's just seen my butler and raised me an army of PhD graduates. Right, we are going to take a break. When we come back, more with, I'm going to call him a sports engineer,

but it doesn't seem fair. It doesn't cover anywhere near the work that he does. But Professor David James will be with us when we get back. he does but professor david james will be with us when we get back welcome back to playing with science uh this is a fabulous conversation that chuck and i are enjoying immensely with sports engineer david james professor from sheffield hallam university in delightful britain or we call it england really. You sound a little homesick, my friend. I know, I'm getting teary. So I said earlier on in the show that you spoke at a seminar about what makes a world champion.

So, Professor, you're up. What makes a world champion? Is there a secret? I think good athletes make world champions. I think, you know, sometimes we get a little bit obsessed by the things that are going on behind the scenes, the science, the engineering, the technology. Maybe we can make a champion, but actually it's the individual. And if you think about all athletes, great athletes, world-beating athletes,

they're extreme outliers um they're not normal they they they literally have bodies which are on the edge of of normality um they really are outliers so you have a brilliant kind of body to begin with and mind uh and ability so the athletes at the core of it but but that isn't nearly enough you know and we know that um basically great um great athletes are made mainly sort of by three three key components talent so that's the key thing you know what you're born with um the the sort of the environment which that talent is then nurtured in and that that comes from, you know, lots of things like, you know, did your mum and dad drive you to basketball kind of classes or whatever it is,

or the team meets on a Wednesday evening, or did they get up early in the morning at 5 a.m. to take you to swimming? You know, those kind of environmental things are massively important. So champions are a product of that system, often by their parents and what the parents have given them when they were younger. And then people like me get involved later on

when you've got someone who's already very good, we can then work with them a little bit to get them that tiny bit more. So what I do as an engineer, I'm never going to turn someone who's not good at sport into someone who's a world champion. They have to be very good already. We can make very small changes at the end, small savings in time, a little bit, you know, enhance their skills in some way through maybe virtual reality or different types of techniques,

enhance their skills in some way through maybe virtual reality or different types of techniques, improve strategy. We can do those kind of things. But you have to be very good to begin with. And I think the third thing, so I've mentioned two things, talent, opportunity, so the environment, or maybe you might consider the opportunity. And then the third thing would be the drive from the individual. So, that personal resilience to keep going when it's tough and that personal drive. I think when you're thinking about sort of maybe a national level, how do you come up with a great Olympic team? In a way, we can identify talent quite well. It's not precise science, but we're pretty good at picking out people who are going to be good. We can provide the right environment, but it's very hard to identify people who have got those really strong motivations,

that willpower to do it. That's the kind of the guesswork. And some people have it and some people don't. And the best athletes have got all three. They've got that talent, they've had the opportunities, and they've got that drive as well. So I think it's those three things that make a world champion. Yeah. People like LeBron James who just tick that box and have that X factor. I mean, there is one of your published works,

The Physics of Winning, because you're trying to remember your own works now, aren't you? You've done that many. I'm just thinking you've had your whole team of PhD students and graduates, and you've sat them down to come up with an equation. So you've kind of got your own equation for winning in physics but is it quite that simple or how did you approach something with that kind of title yeah i think um so this is um this is the difference so some sports are quite simple in a way yeah so we call them i call them linear sports like um in a way like running 100 meters or jumping the pole vault or a high jump or riding a bike around a track. But basically those sports are measured by a single outcome, which is a time or a distance or a height, you know. And actually you can break that sport down into a number of key elements like, OK, I need to have so much power delivered at this time.

And I know I can deliver that amount of power out of my body and that will achieve this speed on the bike if I optimize the bike. And you can basically make a very good prediction of what will happen. make a very good prediction of what will happen and so that's why the physics come in because it's about the energy that the human body has and then understanding how we use that energy to get what we need to get done you know we can tweak things like the aerodynamics on the bike or the body position on the bike and things like that to do it so it's i'd say it's very deterministic like in a way i can predict what's going to happen within a sort of a fraction of a second. And then when the athlete goes to do it, they'll do that. Take a sport like soccer, you know, baseball, American football. We can't do that. We can't make predictions because you might have a

plan. Yeah, I'm going to do this. Then what's the opponent doing? And then what are the, what are the interactions with the team? So we can use physics and mathematics to describe what will happen in sport in these very linear, simple sports, which are often measured in time or height or distance. When it comes to sports, which are games, which have multiple players, all bets are off. It's too complicated a system to try to model.

So thank you for explaining that. You've done work with wearable tech, not just the sort of telemetrics tracking sort of thing, but, and then you've gone on to discuss how it can prevent injury and you're analyzing impact. Can you expand on that a little bit more on exactly what areas you were working in?

Yeah, so we did a project recently with FIFA, the governing body for soccer, football. And so we see there's loads now where players are wearing devices, tracking devices. Often they use like a GPS satellite type tracking technology, but there are many other technologies as well. They have other sensors in them as well, like we call them inertial sensors. So they've got accelerometers, rate gyros, magnometers, these kind of different devices to measure what you're doing. The trouble with these devices, you have to wear them.

And there's actually a potential risk of injury when you're wearing them so often these devices the warm at the top of the back yeah and you know dare I say it there they're there to get good satellites coverage so the satellite can see it very easily it's not a bad place to put it because you don't see many collisions, but putting something on your spine, a hard object on your spine in a, in a potentially, you know, violent environment. What could go wrong? Come on, seriously. What could seriously go wrong? You've got a big hard thing on your back, right? Right. Come on. What could go wrong? Yeah. So, you know, I think there i think there are so we did this big study for soccer and um we tried to understand what the injuries could be as players are wearing these

devices and we surveyed lots of medics and players who are wearing them um and we sort of identified these sort of injury scenarios then basically what we did was we um by kind of recreating that those impact events that we see in sport we're able to improve the design of these devices. And actually is a sort of a basically an impact test that they all have to pass now to be deemed to be safe or safe enough. I said before, like we can't ever make something 100% safe, but we can reduce its risk of injury. I think it's really interesting. And the NBA are reduce its risk of injury. I think it's really interesting and the NBA are doing exactly the same thing. I think it's even worse in basketball

because you've got players potentially landing on a hard court. They've got this hard device on their back. Okay, at the best, it might cause just a little laceration or a bruise, but at its worst, it could be worse. So it's something that's been looked at quite a lot. Unless you're a delicate flower like me,

in which case it would be absolutely devastating. Oh, gosh. Time to take another break after you've said that. Right, don't go away, Professor, because you are going to be back when we get back, and we will have cosmic queries here on Playing With Science and our sports engineering show. So don't go away.

Welcome back to Playing With Science and our sports engineering show with the wonderful Professor David James. And as promised, it's time for a cosmic query and your question. So Jay Bailey, who is a Patreon patron, which means that we're going to start with his Jay's, because Jay could be a male or a female. We're going to start with Jay's question because if you support us on Patreon, that's what happens. We give you

a priority. My roller derby coach once commented that if humans were made to skate, our ankles would be on the front of our foot. Ew! I'm still a little puzzled about that. But what other changes to the human design could you imagine that would make human bodies more efficient for quad skates?

What changes would you make for a roller skate? And it is Janelle. So Janelle is probably a girl. It's from Chicago. What a wonderfully weird question, Professor. I think it's actually, there's some really interesting stuff in that question. Okay. Sort of, I think the first thing is that the idea of having sort of a, basically like an

articulated joint on the front of the skate, like an ankle, is of course something which is done in speed skating so in the 1980s we had the the clap skate so this is a a device which is a it's speed skating it's very big in the netherlands and the winter olympics and the clap skate is a classic bit of fantastic sports engineering where actually by putting that extra joint in at the front so it's basically what happens is that at the toe the the shoe can lift off the the hard skate which remains on the surface and it just subtly changes the um the biomechanics of of the motion and what that can do is it can actually improve the efficiency of of the athlete and the people wear clap skates can go you know quite a bit faster using less energy. So it's not a crazy idea to be delivered to the skates.

But of course, you know, if you think about the animal kingdom, plenty of animals have quite interesting locomotion. If you think about birds or ostriches have kind of almost like a reverse knee and they can run very fast as well. So yeah, it's quite interesting to think about different ways of being. That's a great question, Janelle. Way to go. And we got a great answer. And yeah, those skates sound just perfect for me in the winter. This is Noar21 from Instagram who says, what is the comparison of head injuries in football versus rugby? And I'll include soccer into that. So your football, such as the severity of chances of having a head injury.

Also, do the use of pads and a helmet in American football contribute to higher chances of injuries solely because of the hard material? So a lot of stuff packed into one question. You can unpack it any way that you want but you know do you have any um information on the comparison of head injuries uh for american football um your football soccer and perhaps rugby yeah so i think um this is probably the biggest topic facing um sport at the moment in in my world this whole topic of concussion um you know, it's particularly relevant, well, across the whole, all sports, all three of those sports, soccer, rugby, and American football. I think the, if I was to rank them, it seems, you know, in the data, American football seems to be

the worst, rugby would be second, and soccer would be in third place. So most of my work has been around soccer and rugby from the UK. We don't get much work in American football, but obviously we follow what's happening there. I think it's interesting, I do quite a bit of work with rugby and rugby have been very cautious about, I suppose, allowing athletes, players to wear head protection or shoulder protection because they worry that it will change the playing behavior of players. So players will be more aggressive when they go into tackles rather than actually trying to protect themselves. However, that is changing. And actually World Rugby, who are the governing body of rugby there, they're introducing potentially

like some head protection now. It's kind of coming coming in they're going to legislate for that and the shoulder pads as well um it's it's a controversial issue though because they're they are worried that if um players wear this protection they'll become more aggressive and that might lead to injuries so it'll change the playing behavior and i think that's what when we look at American football, that's what we see. We see actually because of the equipment they're wearing, it allows this potentially quite dangerous behavior to take place on the field. So that's a really kind of delicate, delicate balance at the moment. introducing this idea of some head protection and shoulder protection and lots of researchers are going to be studying how that actually changes behavior in the game but you know there's quite a lot of regulations around it already if you take the compared to soccer okay so in soccer this is

also a topic actually particularly around this concept of heading a ball so when you've got a football coming coming across some players head it um there's a lot of talk now about you know can this lead to dementia in older life or mental health issues i think that's very not very well understood at all actually and i know in in america um i think think you've banned young players from heading footballs in training academies. I think that's true. We've been thinking about that. What's the science for that? Is it valid?

Is it not? I'm, you know, it's difficult because when you head a football, it's not a concussive injury. You know, it's what you call a sub-concussive injury. But the idea is just these repetitive low-level impacts that over time may cause an injury. But that's very, very hard to measure or understand and track. So the science there is not very well understood at all. Rugby in a better place, but I think certainly American football is where it's really happening. And those are some interesting things that you point out. football is where it's really happening. And those are some interesting things that you point out. One, we see in American football that there is indeed a different playing culture because of

the helmets and the pads. And so one of the things that has been instituted this year in American football is the NFL leading with your head or leading with your helmet when you are tackling, especially the quarterback, is now a penalty. Also, when a player is what they call vulnerable. So if a player is up in the air or a player is exposed on the field and you spear that player with your helmet, that's also now a penalty. And all of that is aimed at what you said, changing the behavior, the behavioral culture of the players. And it's difficult. It's hard to do. And I think this is the thing that we know, you know, I do a lot of work in impact protection and trying to make sports equipment safer. But all we can ever do is reduce the risk because actually you can have

very, very safe equipment, but if you play in the wrong way, you can injure someone, yourself or another player, by being very aggressive or behaving in a certain way. So as an engineer, I can't make sports safe. I can reduce its risk. But if an athlete wants to go and do something, you know, a bit crazy, they're going to get hurt. And this is where the sort of the legal side of it gets a bit complicated because, you know, it can get a bit, well, you know, you get sued. Oh, you said if you're wearing this, you're not going to get an

injury. Well, you know, if you behave in a certain way, you're going to get injured. It doesn't matter what you're wearing. Wow. And also, I do have an answer for it, and that is bubble wrap. Bubble wrap. Look into it, David. Okay. Okay.

Yeah. Seriously, I mean, there's some really exciting, just in terms of stuff that's happening.'s happening i mean there's some brilliant science happening here we're doing a lot of work in what we call um it's a really cool material called auxetic foams so conventional material this is really this is amazing science uh conventional material when you um when you stretch that material okay the material gets thinner right so as you stretch it out it gets thinner yeah this is typically what happens. Right. And that's a conventional material.

It's to do this thing we call a Poisson's ratio. It's a material characteristic. But anyway, an auxetic foam is a kind of a, it's a new idea. And we can make them in foams. And what happens is when you pull that foam, this padding material, it doesn't get thinner. It gets fatter so it actually grows wow it does the opposite of what you think and what this means is when you have an impact event normally what happens is the material flows away from the impact location with this material

it flows towards the right impact location it's it It's really an amazing thing. It's called a smart material. We call it smart material. And we're exploring that and how we can use it in helmet protection. We've been looking at it for baseball and cycling helmets and all sorts of different sports. That is fascinating. Fascinating stuff, man. Thank you for that.

That's great. All right. Sean Larson here. Question from Facebook. What effect does the shape and curvature of a snowboard have on its efficiency or path of travel down a hill? Well, again, it's a really good question. It's a bit complicated, actually. So what happens is the main thing that slows a snowboard down is the friction between the snow and the board. And actually that friction is independent of the contact area. So, this is what science says, so it doesn't matter how big it is or how small it is, you'll always get the same friction force.

Because as the contact area gets smaller, the pressure gets bigger, so you get more resistive force. As the contact area is bigger, the pressure gets bigger, so you get more resistive force. As the contact area is bigger, the pressure gets less, and you get less resistive force. And the two kind of always balance each other out. So actually, the thing that determines how fast your snowboard goes is the friction between the snow and the board. And the only real way you're going to make that to go lower is by having a low friction, like waxing the board, you're going to make that to go lower is by having a low friction like like waxing the board um or using other silicones or sprays on the board to to improve the or reduce the friction that's something we've also looked at kind of having almost like injectors of putting like almost like kind of lubricants on like a snail faster like a snail you turn the board into a snail you

have the you have the lubricant come out of the board. Almost like have kind of – I've forgotten what it was now. It was going on a bit. So we're trying to reduce that coefficient of friction. But it's not really to do with the shape. It's to do with the friction between the two surfaces. Cool, man. Wow, that was cool. Now, since you said that, let me ask you just a follow-up question just for out of curiosity's sake.

What's your favorite sport with uh respect to uh newtonian physics that's a good question okay i love the pole vaults actually um so i think the pole vault is pretty amazing it's an amazing thing that people do to do like this kind of incredible gymnastic maneuver at six meters in the air is just totally extraordinary. But there's an incredible bit of physics behind it, right? So bear with me. I'll try and take this really quickly. Basically, what you have is the pole vault's all about translating kinetic energy running into potential energy, which is about height. So you might call it gravitational energy,

which is how high you can go. So you're turning movement into height. And of course, at the top of the jump, you have no speed. You've reached a zero velocity and you've just turned all your energy into height. So you can do a calculation, right? Which goes, well, what is a theoretical maximum speed I could run at?

Okay, so you take Usain Bolt. Okay, how fast can he run at? So he can run at like 10 meters a second when he's sprinting, you know, 10 second, 100 meter sprint. Running at full speed, you can calculate how much energy that athlete would have, right? If they do the perfect jump, they can use, turn all that kinetic energy into gravitational energy. And what that does is it means you can calculate how high they could theoretically go with perfect technique if you have the perfect athlete running at full speed as fast as Usain Bolt could run. And what it turns out is that that height is like 6 meters 40, okay, which isn't that

much higher than the current world record at 6 meters 18 i think it is wow and so what we've happened is pole vaulters have reached a ceiling of physics they they can't go any higher because they just don't there's no way of putting more energy into the system so they've kind of physics has put us like a limit on how high they could jump and really you have to do things like reduce gravity to go any higher. Or would it be that somebody like you and your team would come along and engineer a pole that would be able to transfer more of that energy to increase the height?

Even if you're transferring all of it, you've still got a limit. You've still got a limit. Wow. You have to put more energy into the system to go any higher. Do you improve footwear? Do you improve the running surface? Would that affect? When doing it?

You can do. You come up against the hard rule of physics, which is you can't, you know, energy has to go somewhere. And in this case, you're turning all the kinetic energy into gravitational energy. And that determines a maximum height. Nice. Maximum height. All right. So we're almost there. determines a maximum height. Nice. The correct maximum height.

All right, so follow-up question. We're almost there. We're almost there. Right, this is definitely a name that's going to get mangled. Fed-de-gab-baldon from Instagram. You want to have another stab at that? Forget about them. Forget about them.

Oh, forget about them. Everyone's a comic. Even you. So here, Professor. See, that's why Chuck and I are a great double act. I can't read. For how long will athletes keep breaking records until they get to a biological limit in which they can't improve anymore?

Will that cause the introduction of sort of biomechanical sports or athletes? Good question. Great question. We've got some great listeners. We've been looking at this as well, like a lot of how you know performances are changing over time and in all sports what we're seeing is uh every year uh performances well most sports they go up a little bit uh but the rate of increase is slowing and and if the rate of increase is slowing it indicates that at some point it will reach a limit when it won't get any more um in sports, we've seen no improvements in performance since the 1980s. Take female athletics. A lot of those 1980s world records are not being broken. In fact, current performances are significantly slower than those performances in the 1980s. I think

you can talk about issues around doping around that i think that's a very valid discussion to have um but but yeah sure i think humans will reach there will be limits um that's to say you know we shouldn't reduce what we think is possible if you take a case of middle distance running okay in um in you know 10 years ago, maybe 15 years ago, we were seeing no improvements in performance in, say, the 10,000 meters or marathons or anything like this. And then what happened was a new population started to compete. East African runners started competing and performances really started to go up. really started to go up. So actually what I'm saying there is that sport,

although we live in a globalised society, not every corner of the globe is able to compete in all sports. And actually, as more countries develop and are able to participate in sport, we might find that new populations enter those sports and performances will increase. So that's something to look forward to. When we see, oh yeah, this is going to be the human limit, I'm a little bit, well, let's just be a bit cautious about that

because you never know. And sure, you know, when those limits are reached, who knows what we want to do in sport? People like progress. And, yeah, maybe there will be some changes. Or maybe sport will change. Or maybe we'll be more interested in these more complex sports, maybe like football and soccer and basketball, which aren't quite so deterministic.

So do you ever foresee a time that when it comes to human performance improvement, that we would integrate the technology directly into the athlete? For instance, a chip that might perhaps increase your production of adrenaline or that actually stops you from producing malolactic acid after your year, stuff like that. Could you? Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, you're getting into the realms of, I suppose, what's called transhumanism so um as you know we start to develop integrate the technology change our bodies in different ways um yeah i can i can totally see that happening it's kind of happening somewhat already you know um if a hundred years ago if you'd said that a child being born today is almost certainly going to live to 100, that would be considered to be completely crazy.

And so in 100 years time, you know, things might be very different for humanity as well. And, you know, that sounds a bit science fiction, but you know what? Science fiction is becoming science fact in a lot of places and a lot of aspects of our lives. So, yeah, I think I think all these things can are possible. becoming science fact in a lot of places in a lot of aspects of our of our lives um so yeah i think i think all these things can can are possible i think the you know there are big big ethical debates about whether we want it um what it means to be human and um and who would have access and who wouldn't you know uh these things can come at a cost certain nations start you know they start building almost like these super athletes and it you know that starts they start building almost like super athletes and

you know that starts getting a bit crazy so i think there's big political ethical um debates to have around that cool yes um well that is our show professor david james thank you so much such a pleasure to talk to you yeah you're fantastic chuck yeah you now realize that from maybe 1980 to now, so much has changed. Absolutely. There's so much more appliance of science, so much more technology in play that you don't quite realize is there. So, yeah, it's pretty cool when you find people like Professor developing. He's fantastic. And making things happen.

And I didn't even get a chance to ask him about drag force good right that's been playing with science i've been gary o'reilly and i'm chuck nize and there's no drag force here no uh look forward to your company next time