A Materials World

It’s a materials world! Neil deGrasse Tyson, co-hosts Chuck Nice and Gary O’Reilly, and Georgia Tech engineer Jud Ready explore how material science has impacted sports from tracks to swimsuits to golf balls to pole vaulting.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk Sports Edition. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist, and today it's a materials world. See what we did there? We're going to talk about material science, what role is played in the progress of sports, what role it will play in the future of sports. And let me first introduce my co-host, Gary O'Reilly. Gary. Hey Neil. Gary's gotta love Gary. We love your British accent, Gary. Do you? Okay. We do, because we're all jealous, because in America we have British accent envy here, just so you know, okay? We don't feel that envy at home.

• 0:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A former pro footballer in the UK, back where football means soccer. And so, great to have you here in StarTalk Sports Edition. My other co-host, Chuck Nice. Hello, governor.

• 1:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Worst ever.

• 1:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You gotta, you gotta love it, right? That's how bad it is. Okay, I don't think that's the accent we're all jealous of, okay?

• 1:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't governor. No, no, we're trying to keep it, you know, BBC English. Even Dick Van Dyke wouldn't go there. No, no. Dick Van Dyke as in Bert in the first... Mary Poppins. Mary Poppins, yes, yes. Now, I have my BBC. Younger than 70 who wouldn't know that reference, okay? Oh dear.

• 1:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm being dinosaur'd. Well, none of us have any expertise in material science, so doing the StarTalk thing we do, we find someone who does. And join me in welcoming Judd Reedy from Georgia Tech. Judd, welcome to StarTalk. Thank you Neil, glad to be here, appreciate it. Excellent, excellent. You're an engineer, you got three engineer degrees, right from scratch, bachelor's, master's, PhD. Let me just ask you, what percent of engineering folk actually get PhDs? Because you're so employable at the master's level. It's Judd, he's the only one.

• 2:26Chuck Nice?

  It's just him.

• 2:27Speaker 02

  There's a couple more out there for sure, but yeah, right out of the bachelors, uh, my students here at Georgia Tech are getting incredible offers and they go on to, to great, successful careers in industry. A lot of them come back to graduate school, either get a technical masters or MBA. My wife is an engineer. She's getting her MBA right now, in fact.

• 2:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. So, so when you need money, you take out loans from them because you're still an academic.

• 2:48Speaker 02

  I'm not making money off of anything that I do here for sure. I'm a state employee working for the government. I get good vacation benefits and that's about it. And really good internet connection.

• 2:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There you go. There you go. But just to be clear, um, though most people who will consume this, this podcast will be hearing the audio rather than video, let me just say, on the wall behind you, you have an entire wall of plaques and, and, and you told us offline that those are what?

• 3:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's the Great Wall of Judd. Those are all the patents that we've received throughout my career. So 20 years now. Uh, some are, uh, electronic materials, for instance, resistors in cell phones. Other are springs and mattresses.

• 3:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, don't tell me you can patent a spring. No.

• 3:32Speaker 02

  Micro alloy. Yeah. Yeah. Three of them. Three of them up there.

• 3:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Three springs?

• 3:36Speaker 02

  Three of them. Fancy springs. One is never enough, Judd, huh? No, yeah, lots of little springs.

• 3:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's like, you walk into the patent office, I have this new invention.

• 3:47Speaker 02

  It is.

• 3:47Chuck Nice?

  You're wheeling.

• 3:49Speaker 02

  Micro alloys.

• 3:49Chuck Nice?

  And they say to you, and they say, hey dude, that's a spring. Later.

• 3:54Speaker 02

  It's a micro alloy.

• 3:55Chuck Nice?

  Come back, come back when you got something.

• 3:57Speaker 02

  Got, got little dust of titanium and copper and all sorts of other stuff inside there with the iron and carbon to make it a, uh,

• 4:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, so it's what the spring is made of?

• 4:05Chuck Nice?

  Made of. It's the composite that you actually patented.

• 4:09Speaker 02

  Alloy, in fact, Chuck.

• 4:09Chuck Nice?

  The alloy.

• 4:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There you go.

• 4:11Chuck Nice?

  Nice.

• 4:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So let me get all your titles straight here. A Deputy Director, Innovation Initiatives?

• 4:16Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 4:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For the Georgia Tech Institute for Materials.

• 4:18Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 4:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Adjunct Professor, School of Material Sciences and Engineering at Georgia Tech, Principal Research Engineer on the Research Faculty of the Georgia Tech Research. So you're in. You're all in.

• 4:30Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 4:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I've been all in on this.

• 4:32Speaker 02

  Been here at tech, been here at tech for 18 years now, building up those different titles. And the problem is, all three of those jobs, all my bosses think that that's the only job. So I actually have three, three bosses and three jobs. It can be a lot of fun, uh, sometimes, for sure.

• 4:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, it'll teach you about Einsteinian time dilation, so you can fit all the jobs into the 168.

• 4:53Chuck Nice?

  And I will teach you about cloning.

• 4:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So let me just sing your praises explicitly and implicitly as a material science engineer. You know, practically anything that happens in my field, astrophysics, there's a headline. There's a black hole discovered, a planet is demoted, we, you know, the universe is older or younger. Yet you guys are coming up with stuff all the time, completely transforming how we live. And hardly any of it is heralded. And I just want to just say that I've been watching you guys for decades and watching all of society shift to accommodate the materials that you're handing us and infusing into our products and into our lifestyle.

• 5:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I just want to publicly say thank you for being this, this, this hidden heroes of the progress of civilization.

• 5:48Speaker 02

  Well, you're very welcome.

• 5:49Chuck Nice?

  Have you felt the steely gaze of Neil deGrasse Tyson over your shoulder?

• 5:52Speaker 02

  There's just so much pressure now for us to come up with the next, next item. But we've been doing this for thousands of years. If you go back Stone Age, Iron Age, Bronze Age, all of these are named after a critical material. Information Age could be considered silicon, Nuclear Age, these other sorts of things. So as we go through time, the materials are extremely important to our evolution as civilization.

• 6:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, I hadn't thought about it, that the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, that's you guys. I hadn't, so, so in the Stone Age, you guys were finding the right stones to use.

• 6:26Speaker 02

  That would chip off and make, make flints, or that would smash a bone better than a piece of wood would smash a bone.

• 6:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or would make the cylindrical wheels of the Flintstones car. So you guys would have been nice.

• 6:37Gary O'Reilly?

  But, but doctor, what is new made of, as in new age?

• 6:40Speaker 02

  Certainly the composite materials are out there, a lot of advanced polymeric chemistry. And I'm not a polymer scientist as well, so I like to collaborate with, with some of my friends there.

• 6:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you're trying to find things that are light and strong, basically, right?

• 6:53Speaker 02

  Particularly in sports is the strength to weight ratio, because we could make all sorts of things out of steel, but... God, a football player wearing steel armor playing football, that's just not gonna make for a very exciting game after much.

• 7:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's called a knight. Knights, the knights in armor, they can't get up once they fall. So, your specific specialty from my notes tells me that you think of carbon nanotubes?

• 7:17Speaker 02

  We do.

• 7:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And just remind people what those are, or tell them for the first time?

• 7:21Speaker 02

  A carbon nanotube is, if you're from the south like I am, is chicken wire, sagittal lattice of carbon, carbon atoms that are then rolled into a cylindrical tube. It's roughly 10 or so atoms across, if it's a single-wall nanotube, across the diameter. A lot of the carbon nanotubes we grow here in our lab are multi-wall, so it's like an onion or a Russian Kachina doll, where they're nested amongst each other.

• 7:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, this is only, there's no other atoms involved? Just carbon making this six-sided hexagon that is tiling the wall of a cylinder? Is that what you're describing to us?

• 7:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's the goal, is to have nothing but carbon, carbon bonds forming these hexagons. There's often and always some defects, so instead of perfect hexagons, you might get a few pentagons in there with some dangling bonds that've been attached to oxygens and hydrogens in the atmosphere.

• 8:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Would that create a weakness in your structure?

• 8:16Speaker 02

  Structurally, yeah. I primarily use the carbon nanotubes for their electrical applications. We focus on energy capture, storage, and delivery for aerospace applications with an emphasis on the space. So, energy capture, like solar cells, we just had a mission come back from the International Space Station, just splashed down last week, going back again in August.

• 8:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But just to be clear, there's something just happened in that sentence that I just want to put it out there, okay? Our space shuttle, which we no longer have, no longer fly, landed on a runway. So, when our astronauts came back from the space station, they would land. But now, our access to space is either by Russian

• 8:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  capsule or SpaceX capsule, both of them Russians land, well, they don't splash down, but they like slam down on the ground. So rough them Russians, boy, let me tell you.

• 9:07Speaker 02

  They're tough.

• 9:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They don't land on water. They land on solid ground in a capsule and SpaceX has returned the tradition of landing back in in the water splash down. So I just hadn't heard splash down since like the 1960s. So it's great to hear that. Okay. So go ahead.

• 9:22Speaker 02

  Yeah. And so the energy capture or solar cells, we use the carbon nanotubes to form a light trapping forest, if you will, that we then coat the carbon nanotubes with a photo absorber. So the photon alike can pinball around inside that forest and eventually get absorbed. So it essentially increases the dwell time of the photon in the photo active layer to increase the charge conversion.

• 9:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So these tubes are hollow?

• 9:44Speaker 02

  The tubes are hollow. We're using them just as a as a wire, really, as a scaffold to put the material on that absorbs the light. And then as a electrically conducting member to extract the carriers out of that.

• 9:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So are nanotubes in my life right now in any way that I can think about?

• 10:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, you probably don't recognize it, but they're very good electrical, thermal and mechanical properties. So they've been incorporated into trays and silicon fabrication facilities to carry samples around to to reduce the the static buildup there.

• 10:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So they're basically as trivets?

• 10:21Speaker 02

  They were. They put them in tennis rackets. Babalot had a tennis racket in the early 2000s that included carbon nanotubes.

• 10:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just to be clear, we're not talking about carbon fiber here, which we've all seen. It's there's carbon fiber bicycles and carbon fiber cars, fuselage, you know, plane and car bodies. So that's not what we're talking about, right?

• 10:44Speaker 02

  Nope, nope. These are individual carbon nanotubes that have then been composed or combined with a matrix material to strengthen a composite structure. I wonder about the actual performance there. I think there's a lot of advertising benefits, certainly for including the carbon nanotubes in your tennis racket or baseball bat. But the applications we're looking at are very specialized to take advantage of the low work function of a carbon nanotube, for instance, to emit electrons, serve as a cold cathode for satellite propulsion and a hall effect thruster, for instance.

• 11:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Damn, I didn't, I would not have ever imagined how many different ways you could use nanotubes. And he's probably only just now plumbing the surface of where it could go. Now, sports is always trying to, you know, faster, higher, stronger. Have they reached out to carbon nano people, nano tube people for anything?

• 11:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, certainly have looked at it. Questionable benefits from a mechanical perspective. I think there's really strong benefits from a thermal and electrical benefits to incorporate it as opposed to, say, carbon fiber, which is very, very common, or graphite, which is just very pure carbon fiber typically.

• 11:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Graphite is just, that's what's in my pencil.

• 11:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, but you can make it into a fiber structure. You, you take the carbon, carbon fiber and you purify it even more so that it's instead of 95% carbon, it's more like 98 to 99%.

• 12:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, that would make an awesome pencil.

• 12:05Chuck Nice?

  And jacket. I can draw something with my jacket sleeve.

• 12:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what, um, what branches of sports are, are most touched by this, do you think? Or will be in the future?

• 12:17Chuck Nice?

  Let me guess, race car driving.

• 12:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, always.

• 12:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, they've got deep pockets for sure. The more professional sports that can, can stand to invest in things and to have localized applications of carbon nanotubes, say in a helmet or pad and those sorts of things. I really have not looked at getting my own materials into sports equipment. We've, I've tried to use some of the established ones out there that are like commercially viable so that we can quickly get these innovations into the hands of the public. It's really interesting how advanced materials like a carbon nanotube or titanium or carbon fiber starts out in the military typically, and this goes back to Bronze Age and Stone Age as well. And then it advances into commercial application. That's very commonly sports, titanium, carbon fiber, that's often found in bicycles and other sorts of equipment.

• 13:06Gary O'Reilly?

  Judd, just to take a step back, the applications you've just expressed, what's, I mean, I hear terms like matrix, which gets my ears pricked up, then I get into C triple bonds, and then I hear ABS, which sounds like something that comes on my car. But, um, can you break that down? Because I'm sat there bewildered by a new language.

• 13:26Speaker 02

  Sure. When you create a composite structure, you combine two different materials that have desirable traits that when you combine them together, you take those desirable traits to, to another level. It's, it's not simply additive, it can often be multiplicative. And so you will have a fiber reinforcement like a fabric as well as a polymer like an epoxy. And so that epoxy can form what we call the matrix. And what that does, that shares the load between your lies of fiber or your individual threads and whatnot. And the different polymers will have principally a polymeric component has a carbon, carbon chain sequenced along. And some of those carbons can be bonded with a single bond together.

• 14:11Speaker 02

  For instance, like a polyethylene, or if you have a double bond between the two carbons, for instance, a like isoprene, polyisoprene that can stiffen the polymer. And so it can have properties like a golf ball that will be much more rigid than say a latex.

• 14:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is like you're in a kitchen and you say, I need this strength and this flexibility and this weight. And you're just pulling out chemical bonds of your ingredients, mixing it together to make exactly what you want and expect to have.

• 14:40Speaker 02

  And that's what the ABS is. ABS is a very common polymer in helmets, ski boots and a variety of other things. And the A and the B and the S all stand for an individual polymer that have been grafted together to form what's called a copolymer. So A is acrylic nitrile, which has a C triple bonded with N, which is a very stiff bond. And so the acrylic nitrile provides a lot of stiffness.

• 15:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Were you saying N, you mean a nitrogen atom?

• 15:06Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 15:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so CN, when I think of CN, I think of.

• 15:10Chuck Nice?

  Chuck Nice.

• 15:11Speaker 02

  Cyanide.

• 15:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was good Chuck, very good.

• 15:15Gary O'Reilly?

  You set him up, he'll knock him down.

• 15:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Damn Chuck, that was quick. When I think of CN, I think of, what's the presence gas? Yeah, cyanide, I think of.

• 15:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's.

• 15:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, just yes, okay.

• 15:28Speaker 02

  It is, yeah. But it's bound up in the structure, so it's not releasing.

• 15:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's safe, okay?

• 15:35Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 15:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As long as you don't eat your ski boots.

• 15:39Chuck Nice?

  Still don't sniff it.

• 15:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 15:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Don't smoke the boots.

• 15:42Chuck Nice?

  Don't smoke it.

• 15:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Smoke the ski boots.

• 15:44Chuck Nice?

  So what, well, how about this, Judd? Is there any advancements being looked at for these polymers or even these nano tubes to change with physical?

• 16:02Chuck Nice?

  Surroundings like so like they become stronger when they get colder or they become more fluid when they get hot.

• 16:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I love those when they do that. I love those.

• 16:10Speaker 02

  Kevlar is actually one of those that does get stronger when it's when it's colder that that are people are familiar with. There's other ways that you can have what are known as sheer thickening or sheer thinning behavior so that when a stress hits it, it either stiffens up, which can be useful for say for a shock absorber or something like that, or it can thin out and provide a cushioning impact. For instance, say in panels by a race car around a racetrack or something along.

• 16:34Gary O'Reilly?

  They're perfect for ice hockey.

• 16:35Speaker 02

  As well.

• 16:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why? What do you mean?

• 16:38Gary O'Reilly?

  Um, ice, cold, padding, Kevlar. If it gets thicker as it's colder, so you stick it out on the ice, then it's gonna be good. Surely.

• 16:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When I think of Kev, when I think of Kevlar, I think of something that stops bullets.

• 16:53Chuck Nice?

  I was gonna say, he just made hockey the most interesting sport to me ever now because instead of just sticks, you play with guns too. That's awesome.

• 17:05Speaker 02

  Brings a new, new thing to the fight.

• 17:07Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 17:08Gary O'Reilly?

  I mean, you get hit by a puck that's traveling at over 100 miles an hour. That would be classified as a lethal weapon.

• 17:14Speaker 02

  My wife, when she took her very first trip away, left me at home with her very first baby.

• 17:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, she's also an engineer.

• 17:21Speaker 02

  Correct. She is an engineer, civil engineer, right here at Georgia Tech. She got hit by a hockey puck at the hockey game. And so they, she took that as a bat, as like a sign from the gods that maybe she shouldn't leave the baby with dad for.

• 17:34Chuck Nice?

  She shouldn't have took it as a sign.

• 17:36Speaker 02

  I didn't hit you with a hockey puck, baby.

• 17:38Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I was gonna say she should have took it as a sign to give up watching hockey.

• 17:42Speaker 02

  After it bounced off her arm, some dude took it from her. She's like, hey, that's my puck. That hit me. And so she, she got it from him because she's a strong willed woman. And yeah, very much.

• 17:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You ought to be able to keep the puck that, that you get hit with. I think that's.

• 17:56Speaker 02

  And yeah, it's, it's our daughter's teething ring. Our daughter's now in college. But back, back then, uh, we, it was her teething ring.

• 18:03Chuck Nice?

  That isn't, that isn't the use of.

• 18:05Speaker 02

  We washed it. We cleaned it.

• 18:06Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh, well, that's, that's okay then.

• 18:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, I'm sorry.

• 18:09Gary O'Reilly?

  I already have those plaques.

• 18:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, that's like superhero baby. If the hockey puck is your teething ring.

• 18:15Speaker 02

  I'm sure we've still got it. I'm sure.

• 18:17Chuck Nice?

  That's amazing. It's just like you cut your teeth on the thing that almost killed your mother.

• 18:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, we spent all this time talking about the materials and let's in our next segment bring up all the ways that they will specifically be implemented in the present and future of sports when we come back on StarTalk Sports Edition.

• 19:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back, StarTalk Sports Edition. We've got Gary O'Reilly. Hey. We've got Chuck Nice. That's right. My intrepid co-hosts, and today we're talking about material science because it's a materials world. And we've got a material scientist in our midst, Professor Judd Reedy. Judd from Georgia Tech, welcome back to StarTalk.

• 19:23Speaker 02

  Good to be back.

• 19:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yep, yep.

• 19:24Speaker 02

  Before just some more discussions.

• 19:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, more discussions. And if you've been at Georgia Tech for a while, at least, or Georgian, at least since the 1996 Olympics.

• 19:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so they've got a track down there. What do they call it, mondo track?

• 19:40Speaker 02

  Mondo.

• 19:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Vulcanized rubber. Tell us about what that did to the performance of track athletes.

• 19:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, the mondo track is really a key innovation. I was actually a graduate student at Georgia Tech when the Olympics came, so that was a fun time to be here. And as part of my class that I teach now here at Georgia Tech, the Material Science and Engineering of Sports, we take field trips to all of our different facilities and the locker rooms and equipment rooms. And one of the popular ones is our track. So Georgia Tech was the Olympic Village, and so all the athletes were here and they needed tracks to train on. And so we got an awesome track out of the deal. The difference between, say, an asphalt or a concrete track that many existing tracks are, is that is using local materials. You've got the concrete aggregate and everything came from somewhere in that general vicinity.

• 20:29Speaker 02

  And it's laid down sequentially in a series of rows from lane 1, 2, 3, 4, so on and so forth. And so the uniformity. Around those different lanes differs. So the durometer, the amount of spring that's in the track changes whether in your lane one or lane two, or you're at the start or the end of the

• 20:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Durometer, that's a word?

• 20:48Speaker 02

  That is a word. That is a word.

• 20:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And what does that mean, durometer?

• 20:51Speaker 02

  It's the return of energy is a good way of thinking about it. The springiness of the track.

• 20:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so the durometrics of the track. I love that. I love that. Okay. When you run, there's energy that's lost on the recoil or energy that's returned to your bounce, I guess. And so if you can get 100% of your energy to come back, that would be pretty good. Maybe too much, perhaps.

• 21:15Speaker 02

  Yep. You'll see this a lot of times. People running will run, even though there's perfectly good sidewalk, will run in the street with the cars because it's softer on the joints, for instance. So the difference with Mondo than the asphalt, which are laid sequentially over a period of several days. So the humidity changes.

• 21:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait. Sorry. I have to interrupt. We're just, you just distinguished the softness of asphalt in a street from the hardness of concrete on a sidewalk. Did you just do that?

• 21:43Speaker 02

  I did.

• 21:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, okay. So to most people, they're both hard. So tell me where you're coming saying that asphalt is soft and squishy relative to the cement laid concrete of a sidewalk.

• 21:55Speaker 02

  Yes, just different chemical bonds. The asphalt is typically a petrochemical based solution. So there's a lot of hydrocarbon acid, oil.

• 22:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oil!

• 22:04Speaker 02

  Whereas, whereas the concrete

• 22:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Crude oil, okay.

• 22:09Speaker 02

  Concrete's typically more silicate based, and so it's a much stiffer bond. And so as you step on it, no matter what type of material you apply a load to, the bonds between the atoms compress or stretch if you're pulling on it. And just the degree to which those stretches can be macroscopically manifest themselves to do a feel that you can feel when you're running on it.

• 22:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so this would be the difference between if I took a hammer and hit an asphalt street. It's a very different sensation if you take a hammer and hit a sidewalk. And sound. And a different sound. Right, right. Exactly.

• 22:45Speaker 02

  And also the asphalt. Asphalt typically has very large aggregate. Like you can look at the asphalt and typically see the grain structure, if you will. Whereas concrete will be much, much smaller. And the smaller the grains you get, typically the stiffer, stronger material.

• 22:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so your mondo track is even better than asphalt, here's what you're saying.

• 23:03Speaker 02

  It is.

• 23:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In that same direction, in that same direction. Okay. So keep going, I interrupted you, so I'm sorry.

• 23:07Speaker 02

  No, no. The mondo track has excellent quality control. So it's made in a factory, much like carpet, as opposed to created on site. And so, you know, the width of your, it's usually two, I believe, two lanes wide.

• 23:23Speaker 02

  It's uniform, all the way along the length of that piece of carpet, if you will, that's laid out, as well as the width. So no matter what part of the track you're on, always have the same durometer, the same mechanical performance, and the same response to the environment, for instance, shedding of water and those sorts of things.

• 23:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so it's the proverbial level playing field. Yeah, there you go.

• 23:48Speaker 02

  It does. And so the mondo also has a really good lifetime. Despite being a polymer, polymers typically are not the best choice outside because the ultraviolet radiation will attack that carbon-carbon bond, as well as some of the other carbon bonds.

• 24:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I just have to jump in there because in my field, we think only ever about what light does to things. So, correct me if I'm wrong. There's the strength of any chemical bond between two atoms. You can measure how strong that is. So now you have light coming in, in this case ultraviolet, whose energy is greater than the strength of that bond, and it'll just break the bond. That's what's going on there. So if you had different kind of light, like visible light or infrared. Those photons don't have enough energy to break the bond, and so the bond is safe in the presence of that light. Is that fair to say?

• 24:39Speaker 02

  Yes, and different polymers respond differently. So sometimes the ultraviolet will break the bond. Other times it will

• 24:45Chuck Nice?

  It makes it harder.

• 24:46Speaker 02

  It'll it'll create additional cross links. Exactly right. And so that'll

• 24:50Chuck Nice?

  That's what Dennis used to fix fillings and things like that. They use ultraviolet light to seal the bond.

• 24:58Speaker 02

  Yep. Yep. And so that can take what was once a nice, flexible, pliable, rubbery-like polymer and make it very, very stiff.

• 25:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so this is just the genius of folks in your profession making stuff happen that you wanted to happen.

• 25:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, and trying to avoid the ones that we don't want to happen.

• 25:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Command over chemistry is brilliant. Okay, so keep going. So now it lasts a long time and it's uniform. So what? Why would I run faster on such a track?

• 25:21Speaker 02

  Oh, it's got good energy return. And again, the springiness, but it's really the competitive fairness that plays in. The thickness of the track is maybe a couple inches thick or so, but just the uniformity makes for a vastly superior product that it's not just the track here at Georgia Tech is uniform, but the same track that they put, say, up at Emory University for practicing on had the same consistency of the properties, which has the same ones as downtown at the Olympic Stadium.

• 25:50Chuck Nice?

  So if I ran a world record at Georgia Tech in lane one, I'd probably run the world record in lane six, and I'd probably run the same world record at Emory, but that may not be the case on other tracks.

• 26:05Speaker 02

  Correct. Correct. And I've seen several tracks. My daughter was in the marching band that we'd go around and just see some terrible looking tracks. The asphalt's just crumbling up and just doesn't provide the quality of feel. And now it's an expensive track, so high schools can't be expected to have a mondo and that sort of thing.

• 26:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I just got I got to know, if it's all about returning the energy to the runner, is there a limit beyond which it will not be allowed as a record? Is there some rules about how good you can be at your job helping athletes?

• 26:37Speaker 02

  There are a lot of rules that are placed onto a lot of different materials that are used in sports from golf clubs, golf balls, baseballs, all of these things will have metrics on them. Javelins, for instance, javelin got to be really good that people would basically start throwing them into the stands, which is really rough for spectator morale.

• 26:58Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, that was, that was a guy called Jan Zalesny. He was throwing it about ninety something meters. So if you were high jumping at the far end from where he was throwing, you were in danger.

• 27:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, ninety meters, the full length of the, of the track. Right, right.

• 27:12Gary O'Reilly?

  And then some.

• 27:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so they had to add like aerodynamic drag to it.

• 27:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, they made it worse.

• 27:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They said, why don't you just have them throw them outside the damn stadium?

• 27:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's like a restrictor plate in, you know, in NASCAR races and stuff like that. So it's, it's, it's anathema to me as a material scientist. Breaks my heart when they start dumbing down my material.

• 27:32Chuck Nice?

  I gotta say though, it's a hell of a lot worse than a hockey puck.

• 27:35Gary O'Reilly?

  Because you can't chew, you can't chew a javelin as a child, can you?

• 27:39Speaker 02

  No, it's a heck of a toothpick.

• 27:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, I keep, I keep wanting to move on, but I have to, let me just give one thing out there. So in principle, you could design a track that returned 100% of your sort of gravitational energy as you run from step to step. If you did, if you can, why don't you?

• 28:01Speaker 02

  Well, certainly cost would be an issue, but that's what you're describing is the trampoline effect.

• 28:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 28:05Speaker 02

  Used, used in tennis rackets, baseball, softball bats, golf clubs. And so you just have a thin material that is able to reflect or respond to the energy that you impart upon it.

• 28:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So why, so why aren't tracks trampolines?

• 28:20Speaker 02

  You need some resistance to push against. Like if you've ever tried to run across an actual trampoline.

• 28:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's hard. Yeah.

• 28:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tried that once.

• 28:28Speaker 02

  Not so much fun sometimes. So it's, it's engineering trade offs. You have to balance it out.

• 28:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But once you get a good bouncy thing going forward, you know, it could. That's a different kind of race.

• 28:39Chuck Nice?

  It looked like a race on the moon.

• 28:40Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, and that's, that's just it. You going up and not forward.

• 28:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah, that's right. Cause you need the friction to go forward.

• 28:47Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 28:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whereas the trampoline is really good at making you go up.

• 28:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, for instance, you could have, have that better, more springy substance near the high jump pit. For instance, where you're not as worried about your forward motion as your upward motion.

• 29:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or the, you can have like, your starting blocks could be a pre-cocked trampoline facing forward. Ooh, that would be good. So your first step, so you don't have this time where you have to get up your speed. You're, you hit your top speed instantly. That'd be cool. We should, we should, we should make that happen.

• 29:18Gary O'Reilly?

  And Chuck, you want what kind of big cat behind the blocks?

• 29:24Chuck Nice?

  No, I, I mean, to be honest. I would just like to, I would just like to see people shot out of the blocks if I could. That'd be.

• 29:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, no. And then you open a tiger cage and then they're running after you, will break records all the time. But, and let's get back to the other things. For example, uh, when exactly was it, uh, Gary, when the two hour marathon?

• 29:43Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh, well, let me see. Oh, this goes back to the doctor's point about banning materials and not seeing the, the sort of constrictions. Nike had a shoe out called the Vaporfly, and I think they've even called it the Alpha Fly. And the dream has always been break two hours for the marathon.

• 30:00Speaker 02

  Right.

• 30:01Gary O'Reilly?

  Um, and 2019, Koji, uh, the Kenyan runner, who's 34 years of age, broke the two hour barrier by about 40, 20 or 40 seconds. And he did it wearing Nike shoes and there's uproar. But the thing is, the, the thickness of the sole, but they've got a little special ingredient, doctor, don't they? What, what have they put in those Nike shoes that makes them so special?

• 30:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a, they've got.

• 30:27Chuck Nice?

  Kenyan DNA.

• 30:28Speaker 02

  Got that for sure. They, they've got carbon fiber plates in the base that provide an energy return. And, and I'm not a runner. I only run if I'm being chased. Uh, so that doesn't happen too much anymore. But the return of energy through these series of plates is much like a spring. And just the concept of a two hour marathon, I mean, that's 13 miles an hour that you're averaging running through there, which is a very fast, just regular run.

• 30:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. So this record, uh, was broken, but not, I wouldn't say smashed. So one hour, 59 minutes, 40 seconds.

• 31:01Gary O'Reilly?

  But the thing is, Neil.

• 31:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, so why, so, so wait, so why are people complaining? Just everybody wear the Nike shoes, so what?

• 31:07Gary O'Reilly?

  Because this-

• 31:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nike does it first, everyone calls it Kleenex, they did the pop-up tissue first. So Band-Aid, if you do it first and best.

• 31:14Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 31:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't have a problem with that.

• 31:16Gary O'Reilly?

  These are the rules, these are the rules, you see? The, the, the technology has to be available to basically everybody. If you want to compete in these shoes, they have to have been available to the public for something like four months prior to the event.

• 31:33Speaker 02

  Which I don't, you know, it's, it's a competitive advantage. I mean, that's the whole thing that about competing is you're trying to be better than somebody else.

• 31:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Stop, stop, stop, stop.

• 31:43Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay, Neil's not happy.

• 31:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The shoes don't have rockets in them.

• 31:49Gary O'Reilly?

  Not yet.

• 31:49Speaker 02

  They're magic shoes.

• 31:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, it is your energy. It is the management of your running energy in the soles of your feet. So it is still me running that distance in that time.

• 32:04Gary O'Reilly?

  But-

• 32:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, it'd be something different if I had rockets and stuff and jetpacks.

• 32:08Gary O'Reilly?

  Neil, you don't need rockets. When you're elite, and I'm guessing, because I've never been there, at that level. Because don't forget, Kojie breaks the two hours. He already holds the official world record for the marathon, right? Nike claimed something like three to four percent improvement in your race times. Now, for an elite athlete, that's a gold medal.

• 32:34Speaker 02

  It helps, it helps us non-elite athletes too. I just, I just-

• 32:40Gary O'Reilly?

  I guess, for me, that would just be finisher on a tissue.

• 32:44Speaker 02

  I just have an issue with people, people doing that, because let's just run barefoot. You know, if you've got issues with shoes.

• 32:50Chuck Nice?

  I was about to say, the guys from Kenya, I mean, somebody is going to break the world in two hours without shoes.

• 32:57Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh, no, they did.

• 32:58Chuck Nice?

  They're not even going to be wearing shoes, because that's how, that's their culture.

• 33:02Gary O'Reilly?

  No, they do, I mean, back in sixty-eight, Salas-

• 33:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, oh, yeah.

• 33:06Gary O'Reilly?

  Gabriel Salassi ran barefoot.

• 33:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah. In fact, he started out with shoes, if I remember correctly, and he just didn't like them. And because they were brand new shoes, he just took them off and finished the race, but you know.

• 33:16Speaker 02

  Wow, there you go.

• 33:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so we gotta keep moving through these topics. So for, tell me about, you know, where are, what's the status of golf balls now?

• 33:23Speaker 02

  Golf balls is one of the most fun labs that I have during my class. I've got some examples here. So they started out way back in the fourteen hundreds as knots of wood and rocks, which golf is kind of a miserable sport. Anyway, it's amazing that it took off when you're hitting rocks of wood. You know, imagine putting that thing. And, and so then they got slightly better where they boiled goose feathers and stuck them inside the bladder and, and made these things called featheries. Those had much, uh, truer flight, but you introduce the situation where you would literally explode the ball. If you hit it too hard. Plus, if you hit them in the water, despite being goose feathers that were boiled, it made your ball soggy. So you couldn't use it anymore.

• 34:05Speaker 02

  They then moved on to what's known as gutta percha, and those are the so-called gutties golf balls, which was a polymer. It's a naturally occurring sap from the tree, the gutta percha tree. And that produced a very uniform ball that could be made in large quantities. Then they started to incorporate additional things. For instance, this one's all rolled up now, but it has basically a rubber band that's wrapped around a, a solid core inside it. And that provides, uh,

• 34:39Speaker 02

  golf is a game of feel, as they describe it, so that there's benefits to rolling and backspin and other types of aspects of flight. Now they've got a variety of polymers.

• 34:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait just a sec. So baseballs are, were for a while, if not still, were also a rubber band wrapped around a, a core.

• 34:56Speaker 02

  Got one right here.

• 34:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, okay. So you're, he's holding up a. Did your dog chew on that baseball?

• 35:02Speaker 02

  No, this is a Georgia Tech baseball for my class. We took it apart because we're highlighting the differences in materials. As sports materials have gone along, they almost always, or they do always start out as natural materials, wools and wooden materials and leather.

• 35:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And baseball gets the award for natural materials, using wood bats, leather gloves, pine tar, spit.

• 35:26Speaker 02

  Cotton fabric in here.

• 35:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're untouched by your magic in so many ways.

• 35:31Speaker 02

  Which is really disappointing because we can make an awesome baseball.

• 35:34Chuck Nice?

  I was gonna say, no wonder baseball's so boring.

• 35:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, baseball, so what is the latest golf ball costing us? The latest, greatest golf ball?

• 35:47Speaker 02

  Oh, man. It's this five-piece ball here. So it's got five layers of different material in there, providing a very hard center for your carry. The outer shell will have some UV stabilizers, so again, so that ultraviolet doesn't harm it, but also so it has lower friction as it flies through the air.

• 36:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just so you know, this cross-section of the golf ball, the latest golf ball that you're now showing me, it looks like a cross-section of a planet.

• 36:15Speaker 02

  It is. And they talk about the mantle and the crust.

• 36:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, they do. Yeah.

• 36:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, and the core. Yeah, that's exactly how we describe it. And just like the Earth, each one of those layers has a different consistency and mechanical properties to it to provide either the dense mass to have some carry, or a little bit of resiliency to it so that you can induce spin.

• 36:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So once again, you're combining multiple properties to get one generalized effect that people seek?

• 36:42Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 36:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so is that the future of golf, that golf ball?

• 36:45Speaker 02

  The golf industry is regulated. They don't want the golf balls to fly too far because golf courses are very expensive to build, so.

• 36:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, once again.

• 36:56Speaker 02

  That later par five is now a par three. And you gotta buy up the neighboring lots and other sorts of things, so. No, it's serious. Again, as a material scientist, I've got issues.

• 37:04Gary O'Reilly?

  Imagine you've bought your beautiful golf course in a beautiful part of the world, and someone comes along and they now start to hit it 500 yards. And your golf course is built for maybe a 375, 400 yard.

• 37:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's because assholes like Reedy are making my game better.

• 37:23Gary O'Reilly?

  So you can't go buying up land around your golf course because it's just too expensive.

• 37:28Speaker 02

  Especially because you can hit it 500 yards into the woods. And so now it goes like over the guy's house into the next yard beyond that.

• 37:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so how about the poles they use in pole vaulting? When my father ran track, I think they were bamboo or something, right?

• 37:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We've come a long way.

• 37:42Speaker 02

  I was actually a pole vaulter.

• 37:44Chuck Nice?

  Wait, your father didn't use bamboo, did he?

• 37:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, when he ran track, his fellow track athletes were using bamboo who were high jumping.

• 37:51Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh my, the original poles were bamboo, Chuck.

• 37:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, bamboo was up until just a little bit after World War II.

• 37:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 37:59Chuck Nice?

  Holy crap.

• 38:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, that's when he was there, yeah. In fact, the baton was made of bamboo in the relay races, so.

• 38:05Chuck Nice?

  Well, that I can see. I mean, I'm not trying to.

• 38:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm just telling you how natural materials were still infusing in what we were doing. So what are they made of now?

• 38:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, now they're composites. It's really a great story. If you look at the world records, you can see clearly the bamboo era, then it stops, and then aluminum, and then it plateaus out, and then now we're in the composite area. Because you can take those composites, and just like we're talking about the energy return, you can preferentially put reinforcements where that pole is bending as opposed to an aluminum, which would be uniform throughout the length of it. And so you can preferentially put springiness where you want it to have greater and greater.

• 38:43Chuck Nice?

  Could you ever make one so springy that like the javelin, you could just pole vault out of the stadium?

• 38:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:52Speaker 02

  Pole vault has some great rules. Pole vault basically has no rules whatsoever. The only rule is that you have to carry the pole, like you have to carry it in yourself. So you can make it out of any sort of material you want. Now, there are some good wisdom, and you want to have this certain diameter pole for your weight and your style of jumping where you want the pole to bend so that it doesn't fracture, which are some of the most incredible videos.

• 39:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Highlight videos, yes.

• 39:19Speaker 02

  Oh, my goodness.

• 39:20Chuck Nice?

  It's the only reason I watch pole vault.

• 39:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, you are so sadistic, Chuck.

• 39:24Chuck Nice?

  It really is.

• 39:27Chuck Nice?

  I am.

• 39:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 39:28Chuck Nice?

  I have never watched pole vaulting.

• 39:30Gary O'Reilly?

  Before we jump out to a break, can you build a kick point like a hockey stick into a pole vault and get that extra leverage?

• 39:37Speaker 02

  Sure, they already do that. Yeah, that's that's standard. They very much reinforce specific areas of the pole to do it.

• 39:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the pole is not a uniform material from bottom to top?

• 39:48Chuck Nice?

  Ooh. Which is why if you carry it the wrong way, you get a whole different outcome.

• 39:54Speaker 02

  Definitely make sure to put the right end into the pit. Reverse it and put the wrong end. That's.

• 39:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And just so you know, a former guest, a brief guest on StarTalk, Buzz Aldrin, the Apollo 11 crew to the moon, he was a track and field athlete and did the pole vault when he was in college. So I just thought I'd say that before we go to break. When we come back, more of StarTalk Sports Edition. It's a materials world.

• 40:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back. StarTalk Sports Edition with Judd Reedy, our special guest today, a materials science engineer. And of course, I got Gary and Chuck, my co-hosts, Gary and Chuck. All right. So, so this is what we call the shoot the shit segment, where we just sort of unpack so much of what we've just discussed. So first of all, our crack team of researchers reminded us of who finished the marathon in bare feet. It was 1960, an Ethiopian, Abibi Baquila.

• 41:12Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes.

• 41:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it was not 68.

• 41:13Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, sorry, apologies.

• 41:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah. So, but you know, it was close. He was black and from Africa. So.

• 41:18Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, exactly. It wouldn't make a difference what year it is.

• 41:22Gary O'Reilly?

  Come on, guys.

• 41:23Chuck Nice?

  It wouldn't make a difference what year it is. You know, it's going to be some black dude from Africa.

• 41:28Gary O'Reilly?

  My apologies, I didn't get the right athlete, that's my bad.

• 41:32Speaker 02

  Haven't you seen Chariots of Fire? I mean, come on.

• 41:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, yeah. No, those dudes were wearing shoes. And it was in the movies. That happens in the movies.

• 41:39Speaker 02

  On cinder tracks, not any mondo or even asphalt.

• 41:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  My father ran cinder track, yeah, and he would tell us about if you fall, the cinder would go

• 41:47Speaker 02

  Trouble.

• 41:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  under your skin and you'd get, it was very bad.

• 41:50Gary O'Reilly?

  Not good.

• 41:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Um, a point we didn't get to in the second segment, let's see if we can dispatch with this quickly. Tell us about shark skin swimming suits. What's going on there? Yeah.

• 41:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, so shark skin, that made a big deal in the Olympics. It was a suit that, uh, it was polyurethane, was principally the polymer that was involved, and that has the benefit of floating in water. And so it provided assistance to the swimmer to keep them from drowning, basically, so that your energy could be focused on going forward.

• 42:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, I never knew that, because swimmers have very low body fat, and body fat floats and muscle sinks, so...

• 42:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it wouldn't hold, I mean, you couldn't float like you were in...

• 42:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, but a little bit. It's, a little bit matters.

• 42:31Speaker 02

  Correct, it does. At these, these levels, a fraction of it, it does. So that was one benefit, that it was just inherently buoyant.

• 42:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, so why don't they just wear one of those life preservers?

• 42:41Speaker 02

  You got a little, little, little bit of drag on that.

• 42:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm not swim, just go with swimmies. Swimmies, right. Well, okay, so, okay, I get that. So you're a little more buoyant, so their energy...

• 42:51Speaker 02

  But they were also hollow. The fibers themselves were hollow, so the air could be...

• 42:54Gary O'Reilly?

  Ah, that's how they, that's how they get the buoyancy, because the fibers are hollow.

• 42:59Speaker 02

  And then furthermore, the topography, the surface characteristics of the swimsuit had texture on it that would disrupt the boundary layer, where the water is touching the surface, to transition that between laminar and turbulent flow, so that it released, and so that there was less friction.

• 43:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So this is like what, like the surface of a golf ball?

• 43:18Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 43:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 43:19Speaker 02

  Separates the flow of the fluid around it, whether it's air for a golf ball or water for a swimmer, to allow less friction.

• 43:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so was it, was it outlawed when it first happened? Catch me up on the news on that.

• 43:30Speaker 02

  It lasted for an Olympics, and a ton of records were set all during that, that period of time with asterisk marks and everything next to them now, I'm sure. And then they just said, no. We can't add this. The other thing is they were full body suits that they provided compression. So it reduced the cross section of the swimmer like it squeezed them in. So there was less, again, less friction through the water, but the compression also increases your muscular ability. So there was a whole bunch of really good benefits.

• 43:58Chuck Nice?

  Sounds like everything's good. What's the problem?

• 44:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I know. What's the problem? Again, they're putting you out of work.

• 44:02Speaker 02

  Nothing if I'm a material scientist.

• 44:03Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 44:04Speaker 02

  Right. But the problem was people, you know, they want to make it, I guess, fair for everybody to have accessibility to these same things, much like the shoes have to be available.

• 44:15Chuck Nice?

  So everybody gets a suit. It'd be like an Oprah show. You get a suit and you get a suit and you get a suit.

• 44:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, okay, so you guys must have a museum of the cost of being too good at your job, of the things that got stopped because you represented too much of an advantage over everybody else.

• 44:34Speaker 02

  Just the man keeping us down. Really tired of it.

• 44:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a sad museum.

• 44:37Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, doctor, I mean, for, for, I've, maybe it's just me. I've long held this idea of electronically powered garments, whether they would change color, whether you could change sort of advertising on uniforms or whatever it is. Apart from a battery pack stuck to the side, which isn't really efficient, where are we now with these sort of things? Or am I just going to continue this dream?

• 45:00Speaker 02

  Now, we can begin to capture energy from all sorts of sources. Obviously, solar power is available, but because you're in a sporting event, there's a lot of mechanical energy available. We already talked about

• 45:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That gets wasted, right?

• 45:13Speaker 02

  Kind of the passive return of energy through the shoes, but you can use what's known as a piezoelectric material that converts mechanical energy to electrical energy, like a quartz, for instance, you can do that. You can also have electrical that converts to mechanical. So you can capture that energy and then store it in a, in a usable manner, such as in a capacitor or a battery, to deliver that, to provide communication capabilities, for instance, a Wi-Fi or a Bluetooth type communicator to transmit athlete health performance, you know, simple stuff like respiratory rates and heart rates, or more complex things like pH of your sweat, or the amount of adrenaline, or other sort of stress inducing or stress signifying chemicals that the body secretes.

• 45:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, I always thought that the, at a fitness center where they have sort of the treadmill and you're watching TV. That you should be powering that television.

• 46:04Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, correct.

• 46:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And if you stop working, the television shuts off. So if you're best part, that means you got to keep going. And what really should happen is all fitness centers of the world should feed the energy back into the grid.

• 46:16Gary O'Reilly?

  Correct.

• 46:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Look at how much energy we're burning and not doing anything with it.

• 46:20Speaker 02

  That and capture the kindergartens, too.

• 46:25Speaker 02

  There's a lot of bouncing around in those kindergartens.

• 46:28Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, you'll have child labor laws for that, for sure. But no, I mean, are we going to get to this point where we get super smart clothing?

• 46:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that's where we're at right now is the history of sports has all been about strength to weight ratio. And so that's why we've got composites and we're using the light metals like aluminum.

• 46:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that phrase, strength to weight ratio, is you want as much strength as you can with the least weight. Because putting something into motion, you can make it go faster if it weighs less.

• 46:57Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 46:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you can accelerate it more nimbly if it weighs less. So I just want to clarify, strength to weight ratio encapsulates all of that.

• 47:05Speaker 02

  Yep, yep, it normalizes it out. You know, that's the reason why we have titanium. Titanium is not inherently better than steel from a strength perspective, but it's way, way less, less. So it performs better when you normalize that.

• 47:15Chuck Nice?

  All right, so let me ask you this, talking about strength.

• 47:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, one other thing, wait, before you go, Chuck, I need you to verify what I've been telling people, but you're a materials guy. And I just want to put it out there, okay? Everyone thinks titanium is some magic new substance, but it is one of the most common ingredients in Earth's crust. And it's just that it took us a while to figure out how to make it economical. So is that a fair statement?

• 47:38Speaker 02

  That's a very fair statement. Just because it's prevalent in the Earth's crust, much like rare earth materials, sound like they should be not abundant. They're everywhere, but they're not in mineable quantities. It needs to be concentrated in a place where you can dig out just many, many millions of tons of this material.

• 47:54Chuck Nice?

  Right. By the way, thank you, China, because they pretty much own the rare earth.

• 47:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's true.

• 47:59Chuck Nice?

  Business now, so.

• 48:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's pretty much true.

• 48:02Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, once again, America falling behind.

• 48:06Speaker 02

  America. Yeah, but get back to what Gary Gary said, you know, everything was strength to weight. But where we're going in the future is multi-functionality that it's more than just mechanical benefits. We're wanting to look at the thermal benefits, particularly as it applies to uniforms and clothing, or say tires on a race car or bicycle. You want to capture the electrical opportunities to have sensors built into your clothing. I mean, we've got it now with a Fitbit, but could we have it inherently within the structure to, again, to capture body temperature or respiratory rate or things like this? And then one of the biggest ones, and people giggle about it, odor control. I've got a design component of my class here at Georgia Tech and the athletes.

• 48:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's called a BO class.

• 48:48Speaker 02

  It is. It is. Over and over again, the.

• 48:51Chuck Nice?

  I just ran. I just ran a marathon and I smell like lavender.

• 48:58Speaker 02

  You rode the taxi cab, Chuck. That's the thing hanging from the mirror.

• 49:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yep, yep, yep.

• 49:04Chuck Nice?

  So let me ask you this, strength to weight, both you and Neil. So in baseball, you hear some players talk about they want to use a heavier bat. Is that preference? Or is there a mechanical advantage for a player of a certain size to swing a heavier bat, thereby letting me ask you, can something be too light even though it is strong enough to do the job?

• 49:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let me reshape that question. I have a certain, I have a certain strength, right? And so should I swing the heaviest bat possible where I can still come around to make contact with the ball?

• 49:45Speaker 02

  That's the.

• 49:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or or should I swing a lighter bat that I might be able to swing twice as fast, for example?

• 49:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, most players prefer a much, much heavier bat, but you can't get it around in time. So it's it's very much a personal preference to get it down to a controllable weight. But you want it as.

• 50:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So there are two competing factors there is the point.

• 50:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's clearly a crossover point. Baseball players are so freaking superstitious anyway that you can't change their bat at all anyway. But to be able to scientifically assess how you hit that bat, that's some of the stuff that people are doing now to match the club with the player like they do in golf.

• 50:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, so how about how about the fact that in any expenditure of energy of the human body, the body temperature warms and as such, the body temperature now wants to cool itself. Can you have clothing that whisks away the extra heat and then converts that? Is heat energy so low quality that you can't do anything with it at that point? And you just gotta dissipate it?

• 50:48Speaker 02

  It is a challenge. Certainly having delta T, the difference in temperature, have a hot and a cold. You can do something with that. The inherent prevalence of the heat itself, generally you just want to get it away from the athlete. And that's some of the technology we've been developing, Georgia Tech with some research partners that promote wicking through the fabric. We've got a student of mine that he was a wide receiver and realized that fumbling a football is a bad thing as a wide receiver. And so he created these, they're called lizard sleeves that has a sticky side, if you will, on one side and a slippery side on the other side. So the slippery part you put on the exterior, like the defender's side of your fore.

• 51:27Chuck Nice?

  Tackling.

• 51:28Speaker 02

  Yep. And so you can shed the defenders with that, whereas the sticky side is on the ball carrying side, so that you can hold the ball better. Now, it's not a coating or anything. It's a knit. It's what's called a warp knit. So there's several different fibers in there. And the way the knit comes together, the sticky fiber, which is a spandex type fiber, is on the outside of the surface. So that coating can't wear off. It's just inherently built into the structure.

• 51:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And once again, you're being clever. Were you so clever that they now outlawed it? What's the future of that?

• 52:00Speaker 02

  Not yet.

• 52:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not yet.

• 52:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. It seems like they rule everything out. We're gonna make a go of it for the next five years till they create a rule against it, probably. But, you know, the knit was important because you can't have the sticky on the inside because you wouldn't be able to get it on your sleeve. It's slippery on the skin surface. Now, wide receiver gloves have a similar tacky-like construction. You can't use-

• 52:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which allows them to just stick their hand up high above the head and the ball just sticks to the hand.

• 52:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, you can't use stick 'em anymore. That's been outlawed. But the wide receiver gloves are still okay. Those have silicone pads on the fingers and the palm. This is not an add-on. This is, again, inherently in there.

• 52:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Got it.

• 52:37Speaker 02

  And at the youth levels and the college levels, there are no rules that would prohibit this from football, but NFL, maybe. We've found it's useful, actually in COVID, because nobody was playing football when we're developing this, it's great for package delivery workers, people in warehouses. Anytime you gotta carry something, even healthcare workers doing physical therapy, if you've gotta move a heavy patient. It helps you grab them and

• 52:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, so then you don't have to squeeze as hard to to boost the friction because you're getting the friction for free from the material.

• 53:05Speaker 02

  Correct, it's got it's got the tackiness built in.

• 53:07Gary O'Reilly?

  And that's that's all in the weave.

• 53:09Speaker 02

  It's in the weave, exactly right.

• 53:10Gary O'Reilly?

  So, so, okay, so so far this this show, we've learned that cooking for materials is good, and now it's knitting.

• 53:17Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 53:20Gary O'Reilly?

  I mean, we've you've gone back to the future. There's some simple things that we do that achieve amazing things now.

• 53:28Speaker 02

  There's only so so many ways you can fabricate things and it's adding a new, you know, recipe from our spice rack. The periodic table is my spice rack, so I can I can pick and choose things from there to yield the ultimate performance.

• 53:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Here's what I want to do. I want to have another show on the other side of the house, StarTalk flagship, where we just talk about the geeky things you can do with the periodic table of elements. And what you what goes through your head when you walk up to that spice rack?

• 53:53Speaker 02

  Sign me up.

• 53:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And say, today I want to make this, and I just want to have a conversation with you. When you make two parts silicon, one part oxygen, three parts carbon, I want to have that conversation. Will you come back for us?

• 54:04Speaker 02

  I will. I've got my periodic table right here.

• 54:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excellent. We got to call it quits there. Judd, it's been great having you on this. We love getting geeking out with you here. And there's no end of sports. Maybe we'll get you back during the Olympics and we'll be right in the middle of what's going on.

• 54:23Chuck Nice?

  And figure out all the ways that the things you've come up with will not be in the Olympics.

• 54:28Speaker 02

  The blades, the blades on the on the skates, everybody thinks those are flat. They're not flat. They're concave. So you actually got two little blades on the edge.

• 54:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We did a whole show on that.

• 54:38Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, we done that.

• 54:39Speaker 02

  Good, all right.

• 54:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We did a whole show on that one. So, all right, dudes, we're calling it quits there. Chuck, Gary?

• 54:46Chuck Nice?

  Always a pleasure.

• 54:47Gary O'Reilly?

  Pleasure, my friend.

• 54:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, this has been StarTalk Sports Edition. Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist, bidding you to keep looking up.