StarTalk Podcast: Space Balls?

[Music] this is star talk sports edition and this is going to be cosmic queries grab bag but a particular kind of grab bag because we're going to think about sports not only on earth but off world and of course i've got with me my co-host chuck neistat hey neil what's happening oh right our professional stand-up comedian who's actually in pretty good physical shape even though you never really did any sports in your life is that correct i mean i i have played sports in my life i just don't talk about the disaster that it was okay that's all there it is okay that's honest and i've got gary o'reilly former soccer pro from the uk gary my co-host all right dudes well so this kind of subject is fun because it involves sort of the physics of sports as played in different sort of gravitational atmospheric environments and while i can take you some of the way there when you really want to do it right we got to go for our geek in chief and there's only one person with that title in this sector of the universe perhaps the entire universe perhaps the multiverse itself charles lew charles welcome back to star i don't i'm not worthy oh no it's such a pleasure to be back thank you thank you man you know i we have to bring you back with enough frequency so that i don't get big headed about my own geek expertise right because after a while i said yeah i got this i got this and then you put you in the same room with me and it's like no i don't got this we're in this we are all in this together neil you have your expertise i have mine no the continuum it's all good you you come in from beyond the horizon of the continuum that i occupy let me just say it that way how's that i i do not know if i agree but thank you for your time it's always a pleasure to be here and talking about science and sports and literally everything else yeah well every everything and charles is a friend and colleague and he's a professor of physics and astronomy at uh city university of new york on staten island and some people don't know that he was with me 20 years ago when we were building and finishing the new hayden planetarium in rose center so yeah i was six at that time [Laughter] i was i was being squeezed into the corners to make sure that children couldn't get stuck charles little the young sheldon of the hayden [Laughter] so we got you charles here and so but just why could you just uh you know we've got questions from patreon which has been our our sole source if you want to get questions on cosmic queries you can join patreon for a very low entry level i mean we want you to you know go a little higher but entry level gets you get you at least this far on it and so charles do you have just an overarching thoughts about sports on earth versus what might be necessary on other planets if we were a multi-planet species for example oh yeah the basic point is that all human motion is fundamentally pushing against gravity everything we do whether we're walking or we're standing or we're jumping or anything like that trying to hit a baseball trying to keep it off the ground everything is based on gravity when it comes right back down to it so in the end if you're an environment where there is no gravity or microgravity then your own personal forces take over those activities suddenly your physiology matters way more suddenly the environment in which you are playing the size the shape the speed all the different things matter it's going to change sports fundamentally no matter where we go in the universe as long as it's not 9.8 meters per second squared acceleration wow so finally we can play quidditch in outer species except that you know if you get hit by a bludger uh you don't fall right where are you gonna go right oh that's right because yeah i forgot about that because they even though they're flying around they're still magically if they fall off they fall to the ground and that they're that hurt they're still there still in play the play field all right however if you were playing jetpack quidditch and your broom has its own propulsion so um as in rockets right when you do get hit you'll be knocked off course you have to correct in order to come back so but you won't but you won't fall to the ground that's right there you go as a spectator i haven't come to see you do quite nicely i've come to see you go splat gary did you just say what is the fun of quidditch in outer space no yes without without the floor to land to smash into without falling yeah wait wait wait so charles the the so maybe we're thinking we're too narrow in our thinking maybe the sports that we have honed on earth were conceived in a sort of a 1g environment maybe if we go to the moon at at one-sixth gravity or or mars at 40 percent 38 gravity maybe we should say what sports would can we invent sports that would be best served by those gravitational fields and not try to port something from earth to these other locations i agree with you completely whole new kinds of sports and i thought i have an argument just agreeing with me charles you just agree i completely agree with you well on mars i know it will be mutant badminton where your little mutant like cuado is the only one actually allowed to hold the racket so so the little mutant growing out of your chest i got you there it is i thought the mutant comes out and does a slow soft shoe well yeah but he'd have to use your feet that's no problem oh no not again yeah so so that's a good way to think about it now so who's got the questions chuck you do you have the questions from patreon both gary and i have you both yeah okay so who goes first i'll jump in i'll jump in okay one of our patreon patrons uh what elements or considerations would be important for an outer space sport so we're going to drill a bit deeper into what we've just discussed he says i'm guessing it's a he william i would love to see an ender's game style arena but what would really be entertaining to watch people compete at in space so we've got again the entertainment i need someone to hit the floor i need entertaining so when he says he means he implies zero g i think when he's saying in space right i think it's it's that without the net to save you or no net to not save you where is that where is the risk factor that we all are going to watch someone defy the risk because due to their expertise all right um the for those people who aren't familiar with ender's game that was a novel written by orson scott card a number of decades ago where to fight an alien menace a number of children were put into a place called the battle school and they were out in space and trying to figure out all kinds of new strategies and methods that the adults put them in and it was a little creepy of a book actually um but nevertheless chuck i knew that i knew everything you just said i knew that so neil your nose has grown by about six inches no of course you do but but the it was very interesting orson scott car did a good job trying to imagine what fighting and combat would be like in zero g in a number of those cases was later made into a movie with various cgi effects and things like that i don't know that they did as well as as we would have liked them to but you know what would be fun a boxing match if i hit you we both you foil from that contact that's right so so what we're probably going to be talking about my guess is that you're you're going to be thinking much more about uh evade and capture type games as opposed to retrieving and object type games so football soccer baseball and those kinds of things you hit a ball it's going to go everywhere it's going to you know you just have to go get it and then there's no air messing with it the spin will be hard to work with um rather it'll be like can you grab that person that's going from point a to point b uh before the person gets there uh there's probably going to be issues of musculature uh are you going to bounce off the corner yeah how big is the space going to be can you change your position and then the equipment will matter so much too just as chuck was saying earlier about jet packs right uh if you can't if as soon as you launch yourself up in the same way that a basketball player leaving the floor knows where uh you're coming down you're gonna have to launch yourself and know where you're gonna be headed unless you put some sort of energy or force uh behind where you're working or what you're doing so it's going to be much more physics based well it's not only that charles i mean on earth we can move forward or in any direction we choose because this friction between us and some other surface that enables that but um in space any time you want to change direction you have to give up some mass in order to do that right you can't just choose to change direction something has to has to has to come out of you so that you recoil in the opposite way with your momentum and that's the only way you can change direction oh i thought you had to pray in order to change direction you just give up some bad gymnastics yeah i mean what's the point if i do a triple somersault i could do 30 somersaults and i'll just keep going gymnastics will no longer exist in zero gravity sorry i'm not a gymnastics hater i'm just saying well here's what you would do then right you create a circumstance where you have to leave one surface maybe you're pushed off of one surface and before you reach the other surface then you have to do all your things the other thing that you could do though is you could have magnetized gravity boots so from surface to surface you know the the magnetic is turned off on one you push off and then as you go then it's turned on the other and it's that's when it pulls you and sticks so right so like space space pradas yeah well wait so if if it's a magnetic stick then you always stick the landing because you will connect to the magnet if it's electro magnets that they just turn on yeah but it could be cool too for wrestling so neil think of it like this well i'm asking i shouldn't say think of it this way because i've never wrestled anybody except my own demons [Music] stand strong but okay let's say you're wrestling right so you're on the platform and you have certain points of your body that have magnetized uh like uh like knee pads elbow pads and your shoes okay so while you're wrestling these are turned on okay the the floor is magnetized you guys are actually wrestling but at any point they can turn it off maybe it's on a cycle so it'll be so it'll be very uh fair to everybody it's going to be a cycle or it's regularly random you're going to do it random or random right so now how does that change you as a wrestler because is it left is it leverage everything right and at some points you're going to be floating and then what move do you have to think of while you're floating so that when the cycle starts again you're in a better position to dominate your opponent so magnetic strategies or what that is all about very cool i like that i like that damn all right well this whole segment is just about sports and space so let's keep going who's got the next question all right uh i'll guess i'll bring up the next one this is from fitzfritz menzel hey neil if there were a zero gravity sport that involved athletes launching or jumping from one wall of a huge arena to the other what speed could they reach what would happen when they hit the other wall [Laughter] so charles what's tell me about the symmetries of jumping and landing in that let's do the quick calculation okay d equals one half eight t squared the typical athlete can probably jump about what two two meters in the air five six feet if they're really really accomplished uh so you get your center of mass six feet in the air that's that's pretty good right yeah but but they're working against gravity if we're just going to put yourself into motion that's not the right calculation i don't know what i'm trying to do is to figure out how much force and acceleration a typical athlete can create by pushing off if we're talking about pushing off on okay so then you've got a direct measurement okay yeah direct measurement so so uh two equals one half gt squared so that's five two fifths point four what's the square root of point four so point four is point yeah it's about 0.6 right yeah a little bit between 0.6 and 0.7 so you're going for 0.6 seconds deceleration at 10 meters per second that means you're you're able to launch yourself at approximately six tenths of of gravity right six tenths of a meter per second something like that six meters per second all right so you can go so you're going six meters per second and let's say you weigh about 100 kilograms 220 pounds something like that so that's um okay but the thing is if i can jump if i can if i can propel myself at that speed i will arrive at the far wall at that very same speed that's right so i'm trying to figure out how much damage you would do to your face the answer is well i mean we can do the math specifically but let's let's just do it intuitively if i jump at full speed into a wall right or if i say i jump as hard as i can and i'm in a room that's only uh three inches higher than my head think about the the impact that i would feel on my head when i hit it right especially if you're if you're face up when that happens yeah basically that's the end of your face that's right so it's a lot i mean you can really cause yourself serious damage no question about it right so what you'd have to do is while you were floating from one surface that you just jumped from to the other you'd have to somehow turn around right so that you landed on your feet and then you use your entire musculoskeletal system to absorb absorb the land right as a shock absorber exactly so basically our sports in zero g will be performed by cats highly padded humans right it's so funny all right give me another one and what else you got all right um okay matthew ritter i've heard that due to titan's thick atmosphere and low gravity that powered flight would be possible we'd also be super man charles i had not heard of that is it is that what's the thickness of titan's atmosphere do you remember uh it's a little bit more than earth's atmosphere actually but but if it's only a little bit more uh yeah one point something or two point something earth okay so it's not like venus where it's a hundred times atmosphere it's it's of order earth's atmosphere okay so where do you gain most going to holding aside the fact that you'll get vaporized on venus ignoring that complication is the atmosphere thick enough for you to gain lift just by your own uh strength or do you have to go to the lower gra because venus has earth gravity what do you have to go to the lower gravity of titan and take advantage of that fact against the slightly higher uh density atmosphere um i would go with i would go to titan uh the the advan because you realize that venus's atmosphere is so thick that it's like being down half a mile in earth's oceans to be at the surface of venus right so even our best nuclear submarines have a hard time surviving at that level so even if you can build an airplane you could be crushed like an egg anyway right you're much better off in a moderate atmospheric period uh area where you can actually fly let's just say for instance uh we're somehow adapted to the pressure right if you have an atmosphere that thick do you still need the same aerodynamic uh lift and everything to fly or would you be just resting on the actual like the actual atmosphere itself no no to your point chuck it is possible for the atmosphere to be so thick right you don't have to fly because you're just floating in it that's what you're doing yeah that's my point it's like it would be like being in the middle of the ocean the water is yeah i don't have to fly in the ocean i just float in the ocean well there's a difference between density and pressure in that kind of environment right so if something can have high pressure but relatively low density although there is a relationship as we all know the the so-called ideal gas law right pv equals nrt so there is a direct relationship between well it's a relationship i don't say direct necessarily because that's mathematically specific but all these different factors come into account it is possible for something like a a balloon to float in venus or on venus in its atmosphere right in that case if you were floating on the atmosphere you would rather be above the cloud tops of venus than above the cloud tops of titan because then you would have more buoyancy because of the the pressure the atmospheric pressure that you get no but but how about just my own strength to fly just by you know put on some wing looking right appendages right like like all those old 1918 films where they show guys trying to jump off of all those all those guys right if they want a different planet with a thicker atmosphere i bet some of them would have flown away they probably would have some of them might have been successful but again the only problem is that everything else has to be adapted accordingly right if your wings get crushed and shredded because of the pressure before you even get down there that's going to be a very icarus like situation i'm just picturing a guy falling from a cliff flapping his arms going if only i had been on venus you really think those are his last words [Laughter] it's probably oh [Laughter] all right we're going to take a quick break when we come back more star talk sports edition cosmic queries kind of a grab bag but it's about it's about it's about athletics in space and but when we come back let's talk about sort of more exotic things here on earth on star talk we're back star talk cosmic queries sports edition and we're just talking about sports in space and on earth and all the ways that the laws of physics dictate what you can and cannot accomplish and i've got with me chuck chuck nice man and gary o'reilly i know and i got my resident geek in chief charles liu who's got his own sort of fan base within the star talk fan base they're people who are all into chuck chuck charles luke charles sorry if i say chuck i really probably mean chuck nice but occasionally a chuck slips out when i'm talking to you charles so just i know i just i mean my twitter handle is at chuck liu that's right oh it is okay all right yeah yeah yep so so let's keep going we've got uh these are patreon members sort of exclusive questions that they get to ask so who's up next this is violetta your number one fan she's an astrophysics fan and she's a sports fan she's she's asking about the two main types of muscles fast twitch slow twitch fast twitch are good for quick bursts of energy like sprinting and slow twitch are good for endurance but supposedly people genetically have one or the other so which one would be better for space travel also and this is the kicker ps i'm the fast twitch type i can sprint from home to first base like you wouldn't believe whoa i love it absolutely fantastic most baseball players are primarily fast twitch types because you you have to be ready to move at any given time and then move explosively when the opportunity happens so if i remember correctly violetta is indeed an excellent baseball player so i'm not at all surprised about that and i think charles there's a there's you do get a combination but then the majority is one or the other yes and every muscle yeah every muscle has a mixture and in fact uh the slow and fast twitch uh the fast twitch muscles so-called themselves are actually divided into two kinds as well the type one we call the slow oxidative and then the type 2 there's a 2a fiber which is a fast oxidative and glycolytic fiber and then there's a 2x which is just fast glycolytic fiber so um what does all that mean like all right so does that mean i can run do you tell me the fast twitch fibers have slow twitch fibers in them uh no each muscle has a number of fibers in it and a combination of fast and slow the mixture of those two that's right is is where you wind up with your particular brand of fast twitchiness and slow twitch and from people who have an equal amount they just sit around and do nothing okay so the perfect mixture is good for the thumb on the remote control right you what the actually the so folks like to do triathlons right um they our course are are slow twitch supposedly because everything is an endurance sport but i could imagine a sport in space someday where you combine slow and fast you have to do both kinds of things like run the equivalent of some sort of marathon and then quickly sprint a hundred yards or something and then shoot a gun and then throw a distance yeah we have those sort of sports right now and if you think about basketball if you think about soccer they're explosive but they're over extended length of time and you don't get breaks so we kind of have a combination of that sort of thing so yeah it's uh yeah so lucky for firelitter charles we always any anytime anyone has portrayed people in space everything is kind of in slow motion yeah you need that strauss walls to carry you through that there is no fast twitching going on in space so what's up with that or is that just our our how we imagined it the the again because we don't have to push against gravity we don't have to sustain any muscular activity right you produce a burst of impulse and then everything flows out of that right so you feel like you're not doing anything so the answer to violeta's question specifically is and and violetta one of these days please tell us how whether we should pronounce it violetta or violeta because you know it matters um and we want to get it right the answer to your question violetta is that because everything matters as far as fast twitch uh and the impulse and then what you do with that impulse after you stop the impulse fast twitch people are definitely better at space sports than slow twitch people that would be my guess and just to be clear just to highlight what charles just said right and and gary here's just something interesting to know in soccer you can explosively go from like zero to sort of high speed in space you just have to do that once at the beginning and you just float the rest of the way at that same speed whereas you're always overcoming the fact that you're slowing down because you're there's friction between you and the road and you need to change the direction and all the other things the change direction is another sort of point of acceleration charles tell us about acceleration going from zero to some speed that you didn't have before and acceleration changing direction just put that on the on a table here for us well when you are speeding up right acceleration or slowing down deceleration physicists normally just call deceleration negative acceleration so you're just moving back and forth depending on that now when you are going from no speed to a new speed right uh that is actually a quick burst of energy and what you're doing is you're changing your net momentum so you're exerting a certain amount of acceleration over a certain amount of time and and force times time right is what we call impulse it's a version of momentum and so when you're trying to accelerate from zero to something it's how fast you can exert the force and for you know how long a period of time that determines how fast you get to when you get to the zero to the whatever and i'm fast i turn out the lights and i'm in the bed before the room get dark you float like a butterfly and sting like a bee too rumble young man rumble wait but charles i wanted you to talk about what it means for acceleration to also refer to a change in your direction oh that's true when you're going around in a circle for example you could be going at the same speed but because you're changing direction every moment you are changing you are experiencing an acceleration we physicists as you know neil think of acceleration as a change both in how fast you're going and what direction you're going and so as a result you have to take both of these things into account if you're out in space you kick off you're in one direction and unless you can push yourself or kick off in some other direction you're going to stay in the same direction moving forward a straight line right until you are acted upon by some force something else and that's where you have to lose the mass that we were talking about yeah yeah or or get help from something bigger that has mass like right isn't that well yeah gravitational gravitational exactly right you'd have to come really close to a planet or something and come at just the right velocity and you know you have to move the speed and direction such that you don't get captured by the object but then you can borrow so like planetary billiards speaking of a new sport gravity assist that's what i'm talking about see what size what size would you how small could you make objects like that and and then have that sport would it have to be planets whoa well you you kind of need really large amounts of mass right so you might need like white dwarf star or neutron star material damn that that's and that would allow you to produce enough gravitational effect within say the space of a typical football pitch or something that's crazy um well how about this then back to magnets how about you have like a game like billiards where the idea is to uh transfer energy by colliding the balls so that they actually end up hitting a magnetic pole and that's how you sink it into the pocket instead of a pocket it's the pole and you have to would that work or would it be something like if you hit it on the wrong angle like it would just go off forever you'd be like look at that i lost another electromagnetic force follows the inverse square law just like gravity does so it is mathematically appropriate if you use magnetism or some sort of electrostatic repulsion or something like that to mimic the behavior of what gravity would do to us here on earth that would be perfectly acceptable the challenge is that here on earth because we're all on the surface of the planet right we all experience the same gravitational acceleration to very very uh nearly identical amounts so whether i'm at the end zone or whether i'm at midfield i'm still experiencing 9.8 meters per second squared acceleration if you're using electromagnetic stuff as soon as you move some distance you're going to wind up feeling a difference in the amount of force because your source is so concentrated compared with the earth which is so broad compared to our football or our sports arenas shall we say cool interesting all right well give me some more questions all right this one is from roman procup and roman says hey gary do you think it's possible to improve the shooting speed by engineering materials on football shoes similar to how we have improved shooting strength with hockey sticks are you sad you didn't experience these impacts of science in your active career in other words bro are you are you sad you're old you're you're an old partner yeah yeah it's like brother you're like too old to have technology in your sports so absolutely had leather helmets you know i don't think we can get a kick point in a boot like you have in a hockey stick an ice hockey stick and but although that just increases the speed and the power immensely what i could imagine is something that we've discussed from time to time and why major league baseball doesn't have aluminum bats and i said it for you because the exit velocity is so so fast but if you put something that's lightweight and strong maybe like aluminium or a ceramic plate in in the in a kicking position on the foot maybe you could improve the exit velocity off but wait charles charles would you you break your instep break you'll break someone's shins if you miss the ball yeah charles let me ask you if yeah is is gary right here do you want your shoe to be more rigid or do you want it to have some kind of a springy textured skin so that there's like a double sort of springiness to when your foot makes contact with the ball which of those would be better it depends on whether you want force or control yes right speed or control this is true for any material if you have a longer contact time you can impart to it more force right because the maximum amount of force that you can produce per given unit of time uh you multiply that by more time you wind up with more net force or impulses right but the problem is the longer the contact happens the more the ball and your foot have to interact with one another thus creating sort of micro forces or directional changes that are beyond your control things that are not mathematically so the instant your foot touches the ball is not the instant the ball leaves your foot that's right so you'd have to recalibrate what that all of that would mean yeah what it would mean in in soccer specifically is that you wouldn't want to pass off of that because if you passed off of that part of your shoe then you don't know as well where the ball is going to go but if you were shooting with that part of the shoe that would be to your favor because it'd be like kicking the ball on the valve and the keeper would not have any idea where the ball would go because there's something good enough yeah but when you're listening to your friends you end up just screwing up so they did some years ago adidas brought out a range of boots cleats called the predator and it had these rubberized areas on on certain parts of the boot that would allow for more contact as you just described charles and therefore allowed for accuracy now you can't change your footwear that sounds like cheating to me wow there you go no that sounds like it there's less there's less slippage between yeah just ripping the ball right so if you get grip on the ball i can now rotate that ball better so imagine imagine table tennis bats with stippling nice on one side that yeah we call them paddles here this is america jack okay the word bat is for bass freaking ball okay someone got out of the wrong side of bed didn't they little america jack set you back on the next boat oh i don't even get a plane i get a no boat no no the olympics are starting soon neil you can't do that i can't do that all right i just have to get my merc chops going all right let's get another question we've got a couple minutes left in this segment before we get to like the philosophy of it all in our third segment so right let's let's find another question who's next here all right eric varga you've mentioned this previously in a tweet a few years ago where you said a winning overtime field goal was likely enabled by a third of an inch deflection to the right caused by the earth's rotation the coriolis thank you very much so paying attention in class i was wondering and this is interesting is there an ideal directional orientation for football stadiums and could that be given could that could take full advantage of this effect from earth's rotation so when i when i did that calculation i didn't trust my answer and i sent charles liu an email and i said charles i want to post this did i do this right all right this is this is the double checking that happens always in science if you get a result that like no one had thought about before or is it a little weird maybe you didn't do it right did you carry the two and so charles gave me the charles lu seal of approval i went with the number i made the assumption what wasn't an assumption was true for that stadium that the stadium was oriented precisely north south and so my sense was that you get maximal coriolis deflection uh if you did that but then charles you told me that it doesn't have to be north-south it could i don't see how you get a coriolis circulation if it's east-west it depends on how far directly east west if you're exactly east-west then you're not going to get a deflection from that particular the the east-west rotation of the earth right yeah it's all a matter of where you are the problem is when you kick a ball right you're not always kicking it directly exactly even there is wind involved oh yeah of course no no all other things being equal all i said was that the rotation of the earth influenced the path of the ball all other things being evil and it only matters because the ball hit the freaking upright and you have a round ball hitting a cylindrical pole fractions of an inch as any baseball player knows can make a big difference in the in the in the in the resulting reflected direction that's right so no you're completely correct that going due north south perpendicular the closer to perpendicular you are to the rotation of your frame the more of the coriolis effect there you go the object will experience so the answer to this is exactly north south put all state if you if put all stadiums exactly north south exactly north south right and then try not to ever kick to the right side of the center because then the coriolis force takes you out of the game rather than into the game all right so it doesn't matter which direction on the field you're kicking no each direction it deflects to the right right thank you interestingly right yeah so uh you want to put all your sorry in the northern hemisphere too yeah yeah in the northern hemisphere it'll always deflect to the right and the equator there's no you got nothing and then when you're in the southern hemisphere everything deflects i'm going to go out on a limb here and say any gm picking a kicker based on this [Laughter] and i may not be too good at it we've got a lot of saber metric type things going on in sports these days right i can tell you this if your ball bounced off the upright and went left and not score versus in and do score and that and and a big game was on the line there you're going to be wishing you had the laws of physics in your favor from the choreographers true and isn't sabermetrics all about the tiniest little things that can influence the probabilities of what's happening that's right and the statistics of them trying to squeeze knowledge about the sport activity from the numbers and the data just from the date yeah a whole other thing we got to take a quick break when we come back we'll try to think philosophically about all of the science that's going on in sports and there's a question that i think i saw there about spitting on your hand when they want to throw the the baseball and wouldn't that give you less grip rather than more grip i want to make sure i'll lead off with that when we come back on star talk sports edition grab bag the physics of sports on earth and in space we're back star talk sports edition cosmic grab bag but it's really physics of sports on earth and in space i got charles luke charles you're tweeting at chuck nice i'm sorry yes i'm having a problem with twitter at chuck lieu yes h u c k l i l-i-u okay so i hope i didn't uh no disappoint people who asked chuck nice questions no nice can answer my questions just as well as i can is no problem now that was the funniest thing you've ever said so uh chuck liu liu and uh chuck nice comic we got you on twitter there yeah yeah and my three left feet yes does it have the my in there my three left feet yes okay so i assume you're right footed so this means you're you're clumsy it's like a dig on your own coordination is that right totally okay you're not you're not saying that secretly you're another species right of humans no i i i've never been that clever okay we got questions that are more philosophical this segment but i want to go back uh someone had asked a question about uh spitballs i think so who who who carried that which uh let me jump in here uh richard l sanders uh why does a baseball player spitting on his hands improve his grip oh his hands we're not not just a pitcher instead of lessening his friction thank you big fan of the show well you're welcome richard hope this is the answer you're looking for yeah charles this is a mystery to me it's always been a minute plus why would you want to hock a louie on your palm right there there is a difference here we're conflating two things i believe one is the spitball right which is where you're spitting your picture you're spitting on the ball you're trying to get it as wet as possible yeah so when you throw it then it winds up with weird aerodynamics and the person who hitting it has a hard time hitting it that's a so it winds up with aerodynamics that not even the pitcher can predict so nobody knows what it's doing yeah it's like a knuckleball on steroids right okay that's the first thing so that's now outlawed the last person thought to have ever thrown a spitball in legal competition with satchel paige because he was grandfathered in and allowed to pitch it until he retired but and nobody wanted to hit that ball because no they did not no no no no no [Laughter] the idea of spitting on your hands is very similar to where and chuck jack and there they are invoking the grandfather clause on black people once again but this time it helped him out okay fine satchel paige from the negro leagues then who made it into the majors one of the great pitchers of all time yeah um now the the reason people spit in their hands to grip a ball is a completely different thing that's more akin to someone getting a paper towel damp before wiping a table of crumbs the idea of a little bit of moisture increasing the ability to connect has to do with static electricity right the the reason dust clickings to a wall for example is static electricity and and if it's dry and has enough static there then you can't get the friction necessary to grab the ball it's a surface effect so you're not trying to coat the ball and coat your hands with fluid so that they're slippery but instead you're adding that little extra bit of moisture that gets the dry stuff off of the ball and your hand so that you can grip it better and thus be able to throw it effectively okay now how about was it was it poppy who's the one who spit into his hands when he had hitting gloves on that it's like dude these are like soft leather gloves now you're spitting on that on top of that what what what are you doing i i do not know that one i said big puppies big poppy yeah white puppy well if you you're talking about in all fairness he just hated those gloves [Laughter] my my guess there is that maybe there was a mental process where if you i don't know have you ever like know the difference between wet leather and dry leather they they slide differently yeah they do actually you know now that you say that maybe better exactly it's really true if you're trying to open a can of something and you have like a a dish towel it's way more effective if it's slightly damp than if it's completely dry that's right so i think they'd be that's that's what uh what's going on there okay all right so even on leather a little bit of moisture can make a difference in the grip here's the problem with big poppy spitting into the gloves he hits a home run and then wants to high-five me around the bases dude no you gotta have your you gotta have your wet wipe ready right you get an elbow big boy all right so uh let's come on up with some of these philosophical questions what do we have there who's next uh right uh sam couch will there ever be a point when humans reach a fastest possible time in other words will there ever be a point in sports where no more world records could be set because humans have reached the lowest possible and wait to turn over page time assuming you can finish a race in zero seconds when that happens how will timed sports progress so what will we keep diminishing time for the hundred meters the 1500 meters until it's done in zero seconds is that is that the question until usain bolt just finishes this race the day before he started it yeah he's there before he left um i i just think it's that point where are we capable of diminishing our world records substantially anymore well let me i'll lead off with this but i want to hear charles's response you know you remember the banneker mile right this is when when was this 80 years ago or so roger sorry the bannister the banister yeah where there's no one will ever run a four minute mile or a beat a four minute mile and they're talking about the physiology and everyone because no one was doing it and so the urge to think you've hit some limit i think is very strong within us yet that has never seemed to be the case in reality so charles what's your reflection on the limits of world records i do believe that it's possible we are reaching some sort of asymptotic limit right where at there is some point beyond which we simply cannot exceed however i don't know what that limit is we humans i think the roger bannister example is excellent there are other uh limits that supposedly humans could never get to by the way when if i remember correctly when he finished the mile in under four minutes didn't he bring two other people with him under four minutes uh i don't know if that happened in that one race but within uh a year many other people had broken the four minute one yeah cause cause because the mystique was gone that's right same thing with the two-hour marathon now haven't we is it kip koji surprising enough kenyan runner um if i'm not mistaken um they seem to own the marathon these days uh yeah to break two hours for a marathon i mean that that was basically the holy grail but that seems it's not official yet because it's not being done in a race or with sanctioned shoes but it seems like it's doable as it were right so we could get to a limit someday but i am not going to make a prediction as to what that limit is in any sport and gary has made sure that a lot of our programs our sports edition shows have focused on improving human athletic performance but not just who's going to work out harder but it's what kind of technologies are brought to bear what kind of nutrition what kind of maintenance of your physioskeletal system that you are maintaining so i it could be that we have to start going in these other directions it's not just it's not just psychological and it's not just who's working harder and i think if we ever do reach a limit like it's at just a tap out point then what we'll do is turn to uh augmentation yes so that we can break it and then they'll accept that that everything as long as it's within the rules we change the rules charles here's what i thought about this when i saw swimming records getting broken with such frequency and i said to myself this can't keep happening at this rate and then i realize how you do this okay this is how you do it so swimming used to be time to a tenth of a second all right now it's to a hundredth of a second so maybe future world records you need to track a thousandth of a second and then world records beyond that a ten thousandth of a second and we all be celebrating oh you beat him by three ten thousandth of a second whereas that was not even measurable decades ago by the by the stopwatches that were used and so you can still set world records but you'll do it asymptotically it's you're approaching whatever that limit is we don't know what it is but each next increment is littler than the previous one what do you think of that charles that make happen someday it just hasn't yet uh well we are measuring swimming and hundreds of seconds yes but the records are still being broken by approximately the same increments oh was that right i didn't check yeah okay we could break them asymptotically if we're actually reaching the asymptote but we're not there yet we just okay i got it going to your point chuck if we had ligament replacement the man who's been injured more than all of us is always talking about wanting to be the bionic man no no it's not but you see you're not going in there to repair damaged ligaments you're going in there to get stronger ligaments therefore you're able to put more muscle in there you're able to generate more power if that is what you need to do and therefore you may be able to enhance your performance and this i don't know if that is within the regulations or whether that would seem like a body doping yeah i said full body prosthetic what's that arm still doing here gary just carried when robocop won he totally he was he went all robocop that was a line and robocop lose the arm we thought we could keep we could no lose the arm that was right full lose the arm yeah that's the bad guy said that exactly super cool all right give me some work we blew a lot of time on that one but it was an important point of philosophy there all right we have there here's one for gary hunter q-tone says yo yo keep it hot this one is for gary the man in international football how come the united states fails to produce high-level male soccer players our women consistently prove themselves and compete to the best how come we are having trouble creating a usa world cup team of men that can achieve what the women have already achieved nba has international programs does this have anything to do with producing great players gary why do american men suck at this okay and let's just get paid more than the women okay that's a conversation for another time otherwise we will be on this podcast for the next six weeks um the u.s men's national team are producing this country is producing a lot of talent and it's not just average you've got players now in not just the big leagues in europe but the biggest clubs you have western mckinney who's playing in one of italy's top club juventus oh you're saying americans are going abroad our top americans are competing abroad that's what you're saying yeah because they so why can't we gather why can't we staple them all back together here and then have a national team you do you bring them together for the national team events but at the moment you've got players uh you've got rainer young guys so talented he's a dortmund in germany you've got christian pulisic who's in chelsea and london you have got all sorts of u.s players out there and when they bring them back they bring back an extra level of knowledge it it goes through the coaching staff and this is a process it's maybe a bit slower than hunter wants but i can tell you now it is gaining momentum it's gaining so so we have singularly really good players but we don't have the depth yet to sustain that as in with an inter league with league play i mean you've got one player georginio dest who is playing in the first team at barcelona alongside lionel messi you're getting there it's just maybe not as quick as some people want all right there you go you stay out of america you'll make it happen eventually eventually guys we got to call it quits there charles give me give me some final reflection here to send us out okay we've been talking a lot about performance enhancement right and also in the previous segment chuck was talking about feeling about cheating and i think it's important for us in this overall philosophical idea to realize that we often use the term performance enhancement to euphemize cheating you can enhance your performance all you want as long as it's within the rules both the spirit and the letter but the moment you're actually going outside the rules then that's just cheating we shouldn't call it performance enhancing so some let's say somebody is caught for a performance enhancing drug just say they used an unallowed drug they cheated and that's the kind of philosophical idea the difference i think gary between the performance enhancement and chuck what you were talking about in terms of cheating so i go to the gym on performance enhancing i swap out my achilles tendon with with carbon nanotubes and i'm cheating and you're cheating right unless the rules allow it if the rules allow it then fine go for it but if you don't don't try to tell me oh it's just performance enhancement no tell me whether it's cheating you're not cheating or not that's my take chuck charles you're you said it right and i don't think i think that's unassailable wisdom insight and advice to us all well hey uh thank you for having me it's always such a pleasure to see you always good we gotta get you more i miss you we gotta get you more all right all right guys we gotta call it quits there chuck nice goodbye to you thanks then gary o'reilly and as always uh charles liu our resident geeks bertis expert uh i'm your host neil degrasse tyson your personal astrophysicist as always keep looking up

Channel: StarTalk

Views: 159,345

Keywords: startalk, star talk, startalk radio, neil degrasse tyson, neil tyson, science, space, astrophysics, astronomy, podcast, space podcast, science podcast, astronomy podcast, niel degrasse tyson, physics, sports science

Id: y32rzEip7ms

Length: 54min 21sec (3261 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 23 2021