What is the Magnus Effect? | Neil deGrasse Tyson Explains...

[Music] so chuck i got an explainer but it's like a sports explainer uh-oh so we called in gary because the two of you were my co-hosts for star talk sports edition okay yeah can we do that is there a rule against that are you trying to tell me we're going to stop the other ones because uh what's happening what's going on okay so we're like mid-season of baseball right now and i just thought we should have a little chat about what people call a rising fastball rising fast very hard to hit very hard to hit because you see the ball coming in and you're ready to swing for it and you always swing underneath it and because you think it's going to be somewhere where it isn't of course that's the whole point of what the pitcher is trying to do the whole point is to fool the batter in whatever way they can but i just wanted to focus in this particular moment on the rising fastball so the batter describes the ball as rising rising up from whatever wherever they saw they thought it was going to be and but of course gravity doesn't work that way unless unless the pitcher is a jedi gravity doesn't work that way and old-timers among us old-timer americans so gary might not know this back in the 1970s they lowered the height of the pitcher's mound to give a better advantage to the batters right i forgot how much was it just a few inches and when you just get shorter pictures that would be the same effect [Laughter] so gary you want short pictures but they're not easy to come by right uh you know they they some of the most dominating pitchers have all been tall randy johnson randy johnson among them yeah it was a giant imagine you think about the length of lever that they're able to bring to a pitch and then you've got the vertical aspect and him stood on a mound even if you lowered it yes he showed up for practice they were like you in the wrong sport man you're in the wrong spot the basketball court's that way then they finally couldn't jump so okay you stay right do you remember seeing that video of him pitching and he completely vaporized a pigeon that flew across the past yes i saw that a pigeon flew across and there was nothing left of the pigeon that's that's now that was i mean if you had to die you know a randy johnson festival completely obliterating what are the chances of that actually happening whatever those chances are he made it happen it happened that pigeon is more famous than the sully captain sully sullenberger geese that's for sure right right right yeah there's basically no birds are not sturdy objects right they have to be light enough to fly their bones are very fragile the bones are basically hollow hollow they're possible to be hollow yeah yeah yeah otherwise they'd be um so if you take the energy of a randy johnson fastball and ask what happens when you deposit that much energy into a pigeon there's basically no pigeon left and so you have a you have a feathered pillow that's that's that's right that's some feathers for a pillow that's it that's awesome so getting back to the rising fastball so uh so here's the point uh so in the 1970s they lowered the mound i think was the 70s yep they lowered the mound to bring some advantage back to the batter so that the pitcher is not towering over you plus with their fully outstretched arm and they're pitching sort of down to you all right rather than straight at you all right so that helped a little bit but like you said gary you know a shorter pitcher would have had the same effect as lowering the mound so um so what it did is it put shorter pictures at a disadvantage okay um relative to taller pictures where they didn't make a difference so make a long story short as you know you can put a spin on a ball and as long as the ball is thrown through an atmosphere such as what we have on earth then the arc of the ball will veer from what would be normal to the force of gravity from what forcibly from what you'd expect giving purely the force of gravity acting on the object which is why you cannot have curveballs on the moon it will not work okay you cannot have rising fastballs on the moon it will not work all of these trajectory adjustments that are happening on route between the pitcher's release point and the catch and the batter which is a little less than 60 feet right um uh because the pitcher's arm is forward of the pitching rubber and it's the pitching rubber that's 60 feet six inches from home plate so it's really you're talking about 58 feet something however wherever their arm is at the point of release so and then of course the batter only has a fraction of a second to decide so a lot of the batter's decision has to be um i don't want to call it intuitive but it has to be what their native understanding of gravity is going to be or their understanding of the picture some combination of the two okay so if you spin the ball with a backspin so the top of the ball is spinning back towards you okay we'll call that a backspin yeah because for every backspin there's a part of the ball that's moving forward okay so you have to be you have to specify what the top of the ball is doing so if you throw the ball where the top of the ball has backspin that will create a difference in air pressure between the bottom and the top of the ball so because the air moving across the top of the bot has different speeds relative to the surface of the ball so it speeds up slows down speeds up slow down uh rotating well no but but it is rotating but only one side of the ball will feel the same constant extra force okay either constant more force or a constant less force all right so i'm part of the ball i'm going over the top i'm moving i'm so how should we say this so the top of the ball is is spinning back towards the pitcher okay and the and the air is moving in that same direction across the top of the ball so that so the relative speed between this top surface of the ball and the air moving across it the difference between them is less than the bottom of the ball that's moving towards the batter okay the bottom wall is moving towards the batter and the air is coming back across so in one case you add the spin speed to the ball speed in the other case you subtract it and that difference creates a pressure difference between the top and the bottom if you do that side to side it'll move the ball left to right yeah pure and simple we use these same techniques in soccer when when you kick underneath or to the side or slightly over the top correct that spin that's right the magnus effect which correct that's what that's it's been so named and so um so if you spin it backwards the ball will not descend as fast as gravity would otherwise take it it still descends but just not as fast okay so you're there saying okay it's a regular fastball i know how much it's going to drop between the bat the pitcher's arm and when it comes so i'm going to swing where i know it will be and that that spin that the pitcher put on it kept the ball higher than it otherwise would and generally you swing under the ball or you'll pop it up and so so if you look at the arc of the ball side to side you will see the ball sinks it does sink just not as much as the batter thinks it will and so there's a conversation we had with ron darling the former mets pitcher yes who's a tv commentator and he was explaining to us how he would set certain hitters up for certain pitches later on in the game or later on in the season like he would throw some junk at them so as he thought that they thought that that was going to be the case and i think if you're going to throw this rising fast ball you have to set that hitter up earlier on in the game oh okay so so as you can bring that deception and disguise so you're messing with their expectation messing with their expectations yes yeah yeah yeah so throw a regular fastball that's kind of a a crappy regular fastball so he doesn't want to swing at it but he sees the ark and says yeah okay that's your fast i got this throw one over the middle and and see what i'll do with your fastball that's supposed to be the reason why you step out of the batter's box all together when people think why does it take so long for a baseball game to unfold yes you know it's like i got here tuesday and i miss work i'm this work i uh you know i'm i'm still here but uh the reason why they step out of the batter's box is because a lot of hitting is perception and the idea is to clear your perception of the last pitch and hopefully any other pitches that you might have in mind and you walk out of the body's batter's box and you're supposed to take your gaze away from the mound and now you're fresh brown you're fresh and all this stuff actually has a purpose it's not like superstition it looks like these guys are being superstitious because a lot of times they'll add their own little uh you know rituals and rituals to it yeah but but chuck growing up game long games lasted two hours and many games lasted an hour 40. and now short games last two hours and they all last three hours so i think advertisers i was gonna say you we need more commercial time commercial time good so so so what you might do is mix up a rising fastball with a sinking fastball right so now now that you think you got my rising fastball figured out i now throw a fastball that's spinning the other direction and now the force on it pushes it down rather than up and then you see you've seen this because the center field camera picks it up the ball comes looks like it's coming straight at the batter and the bottom drops out of it and the catcher practically catches it on the ground and the batter just swings over it and they've got it so the point is in a rising fastball nothing rises it simply doesn't fall as fast as your as your psychology and your understanding of gravity would otherwise have you believe haha which which in a way makes a which in a way makes a curveball maybe a little easier because you're not it's it's not moving against gravity it's just moving left to right or it's it's got some arc that maybe started sort of follow the arc you know but with all the all good pitches are hard to hit so i don't want to jump in there and say i could do any better than the dude that just struck out well you know some pitchers do the same thing though with an off speed pitch so it's like you just it's the same exact pitch you just don't throw it as hard you you throw it at chuck speed like truck speed chuck speed a truck speed pitch it's called the chuck speed pitch you know what i mean first you blaze them with a 91 mile an hour blaze them again and then the second one it's like and they're like us what the hell just happened all right so so i i so uh but you should know that the faster you spin it the bigger is the magnus effect okay so because the difference in the relative speeds of the air moving across the ball surface becomes greater and greater and so uh the some of the best pictures when they say boy they got a lot of movement on that ball yeah it's because of how quickly they actually spin the ball as it releases from their from their hand but this is isn't that when the hitters reach the the stitching and they read the rope the speed of rotation because they can tell from the the stitching whether it's blurred whether there's certain things coming what kind of pitch and they've learned to read the stitching yeah if you're good oh my god i only saw six stitches go by whoa so in the tenth of a second i two tenths of a second i have to decide i would say oh there's three stitches not four it's it's coming from left to right and it's dropping by three centimeters i'm going to swing here right right so so anyhow i just wanted to sort of reinforce the value of a spinning ball no matter whether it's a fastball or any other kind of pitch if it's spinning the pressure differences will move it in ways that give the pitcher amazing control and and deceptive power over the batter lastly how about the knuckle ball ooh so the knuckleball does not spin okay now when you see that ball coming you can see you can see that that there's no it's not spinning all right you just see now the problem there is and we'll have to save this for another uh segment at on another show but if the ball is not spinning it is not stabilized as it moves through the air yes and this is so what i'm going to do you're unstable no not emotionally unstable how many times can this happen you throw me he throws me back i can't take it anymore i can't check the ball experiences no emotions right oh okay sad poker stability so yeah rotational stability rotational stability so as it moves towards you it's not rotationally stable against the air it's moving through and so a slight breeze will just carry the ball to a different place and so for a knuckleball especially the catcher they don't know where the ball is going to end up and a knuckleball is useless on a on a day where there's no breeze okay then it'll just go in a straight arc but if there's yeah if it's kind of breezy inside the stadium and and sometimes it cooks around you can look at the flags but that doesn't tell you because those are up above the the level right of the top of the stadium so this circulating air um can be the knuckleballer's best friend and many knuckleballers are famous for throwing wild pitches or having passed balls because the batter doesn't know where the i mean the the catcher doesn't know where to put the mitt as the as the ball moves so that is the absence of a spin also creating movement because we don't have a spin stabilized situation and that's a whole other segment that we're going to do guys that's all we have time for but i'm loving the fact that our explainer videos are now spilling into the sports edition format i'm loving it because there's a lot of explaining that needs to happen in sports too you ain't lying okay starting with this off seas it never mind never mind [Laughter] all right chuck gary neil degrasse tyson here your personal astrophysicist keep [Music]

Channel: StarTalk

Views: 108,292

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, racecar, NASCAR, Formula 1, lip out, rising fastball, fastball, curveball, knuckleball, pitching, pitcher, putt, linear, angular, momentum, velocity, vector, Magnus Effect, air pressure, spin, Mario Andretti, Pedro Martinez, weight v. mass, aerodynamics, friction

Id: 3AgZ7yp5C54

Length: 16min 15sec (975 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 08 2022