An Exercise in Physics

What would a quantum stadium look like? Can you race Formula 1 on Mars? Neil deGrasse Tyson, co-hosts Gary O’Reilly and Chuck Nice, and astrophysicist Charles Liu answer fan-submitted Cosmic Queries on the physics of sports.

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.

• 0:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk Sports Edition Cosmic Queries. Got with me Chuck Nice, co-host.

• 0:24Chuck Nice?

  Hey, what's happening?

• 0:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm happy to have you Chuck.

• 0:26Chuck Nice?

  Always a pleasure.

• 0:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, this is Sports Edition and you're not an athlete, so just wanted to make that clear. Disclosure to the audience.

• 0:35Chuck Nice?

  I am sometimes when I'm sleeping.

• 0:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you wake up after you've won the gold medal.

• 0:40Chuck Nice?

  Right, and they put the medal around my neck and then I wake up like, oh damn!

• 0:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gary O'Reilly, Gary.

• 0:48Gary O'Reilly?

  Hey Neil.

• 0:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  My other co-host in this, which is the legit street cred part of this triad here.

• 0:55Gary O'Reilly?

  Chuck, I still have that dream by the way. You wake up and there's still no gold medal, but you know what? You gotta have a dream.

• 1:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Gary, when were you playing professional soccer in the UK?

• 1:05Gary O'Reilly?

  I spanned three decades, so...

• 1:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Seriously?

• 1:09Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, I am that old. The 70s, late part of the 70s, and moved through into the early part of the 90s. So I made my professional debut at a rather famous club Tottenham Hotspur in London at the age of 19.

• 1:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, cool.

• 1:27Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, and...

• 1:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But you're still an old fart.

• 1:30Gary O'Reilly?

  Absolutely, totally and decrepit old fart.

• 1:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So today in this Cosmic Queries, we're gonna do the physics of sports. And you know, I try to wax poetic about that often in my social media, but to really do it right, we had to reach into our Rolodex and find our resident geek in chief. And Chuck, you know who that is.

• 1:56Chuck Nice?

  Yes, only one person.

• 1:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's only one, and that's Charles Lu, Charles!

• 2:04Charles Liu?

  Hi Neil, Gary, Chuck, it's so good to see you again. Hello, hello!

• 2:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk. Chuck isn't Charles, I'm sorry.

• 2:12Charles Liu?

  Whichever you want.

• 2:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Charles Lu can also go by Chuck, but we have two Chucks, so I'm going with Charles. Charles is an old friend, a co-author, a colleague, and so we go way back.

• 2:22Chuck Nice?

  And he just started a new rock band!

• 2:25Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 2:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is that true?

• 2:27Charles Liu?

  I hadn't heard.

• 2:28Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, well, I'm just judging by your hair.

• 2:31Charles Liu?

  Oh, yes, yes, I'm conducting a scientific experiment. What will happen to my facial expression if I don't cut my hair for a year?

• 2:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yes, the COVID haircut, the non haircut.

• 2:43Charles Liu?

  Very exciting, right?

• 2:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  COVID non haircut.

• 2:44Chuck Nice?

  Well, if you develop superhuman strength, stay away from any woman with scissors. That's all I'm saying.

• 2:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The record shows.

• 2:52Charles Liu?

  Well, you know, my, my brother in law saw me for the first time on Zoom in quite some time, a few weeks ago, and he said, that still counts as a midlife crisis.

• 3:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Growing your hair long?

• 3:03Charles Liu?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Interesting. Oh, and one, one thing about, uh, uh, that story with cutting your hair. So do you know who cuts Sampson's hair?

• 3:12Charles Liu?

  Not Delilah.

• 3:13Chuck Nice?

  Was it Delilah or wasn't it?

• 3:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, see, it turns out it wasn't.

• 3:16Gary O'Reilly?

  Delilah's stylist.

• 3:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's not, it's not Delilah.

• 3:19Chuck Nice?

  Was it Vidal Sassoon?

• 3:23Chuck Nice?

  Cause you know, if Sampson doesn't look good, he doesn't look good.

• 3:26Gary O'Reilly?

  Exactly.

• 3:29Charles Liu?

  It, it was, uh, Mott.

• 3:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Delilah got, Delilah got Vidal Sassoon to cut Sampson. No, you can win a bar bet on that if you wanted to and just, just show it to him. But anyhow, so, so Charles.

• 3:42Charles Liu?

  Yes.

• 3:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, I just, you are on this program because however geeky anybody is, there's always someone on the geek spectrum geekier than, than, than you think you are, right?

• 3:55Charles Liu?

  Oh, my.

• 3:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you are the geekiest person we've ever had on this show.

• 3:58Charles Liu?

  Oh, I am so honored.

• 4:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That, that, that extreme limit, the way we need binoculars to find where you are on that scale.

• 4:06Chuck Nice?

  You are the supernova of geekitude.

• 4:11Charles Liu?

  You are all kind beyond kind. Thank you. But, uh, I would just once, uh, love to be able to score that winning goal, the same way that Gary has and Chuck has in his dreams all these years.

• 4:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, okay. Okay.

• 4:22Gary O'Reilly?

  We all do it in different ways, Charles.

• 4:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, we each have our modes and methods.

• 4:27Gary O'Reilly?

  Same thing in different ways. Yeah.

• 4:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, uh, let me give you a pedigree here. So you're professor of astrophysics, the College of Staten Island at the City University of New York.

• 4:36Charles Liu?

  Yes.

• 4:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you're, you're an associate at. At my Hayden Planetarium.

• 4:40Charles Liu?

  Yes.

• 4:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Delighted to have you on the

• 4:42Charles Liu?

  To my great delight.

• 4:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On our staff there.

• 4:44Charles Liu?

  Thank you.

• 4:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you're an associate, so it means we we reach for you when we need you and you contribute and participate in many of our excellent programs. And they just came out with the Handy Physics Answer Book.

• 4:57Charles Liu?

  Yes.

• 4:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Coming out like it came out this year and it's part of the Handy Answer Book series. And so that's just great. I'm so that it's that kind of background that you have not only in astrophysics, but in basic physics that contributes to this. So Gary, you got the first question?

• 5:14Gary O'Reilly?

  I have, and this is from our Patreon patrons. And we are, we are lovely with them. And right, this is Isam Kabaz. Since most sports contain some degree of probability or chance, I wonder if a new sport can be devised that takes into account the probability presented by something like, and this is going to go way over my head, wave particle duality.

• 5:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 5:43Charles Liu?

  Wow.

• 5:44Gary O'Reilly?

  Because that sounds like a surfboard for two. But I'm guessing that's my low brain attitude to this. So please, guys, you've got to expand on that.

• 5:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Charles, what do you, oh, by the way, let me just say that the sport with some of the least probability involved in it is wrestling. Okay, it's you and your muscles against the your opponent and their muscles. And it's not, did you hit the ball in the right fraction of an inch? Or is the wind going in the right direction? If you, if you, if you lose, your ass lost. Okay? It's just that simple.

• 6:14Charles Liu?

  Unless for some reason your muscle had a twitch for no good reason.

• 6:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A random twitch.

• 6:19Charles Liu?

  Quantum mechanically induced twitch that caused your arm to suddenly be pinned behind your back. The odds of that are slim, I admit.

• 6:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That forced you to just go to your back like with for no reason.

• 6:29Charles Liu?

  So so wave particle duality, Gary, is

• 6:33Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes.

• 6:33Charles Liu?

  A fundamental part of quantum theory. So so Frenchman Villain de Broglie, he he basically said and explained that there is this wave particle duality. So a little particle like an electron behaves simultaneously, both as a particle, something with negative charge, for example, and as a wave. So it produces interference effects and things like that, just as an ocean wave might in a larger environment. De Broglie also

• 7:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Two ocean waves.

• 7:03Charles Liu?

  Two ocean waves coming through and hitting each other, that's right.

• 7:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 7:05Charles Liu?

  Uh, the, the odd thing is that even something large, like a baseball or a soccer ball or something like that, is also a matter wave. But the wavelength is so tiny, far smaller than an atomic nucleus, that we in the macroscopic world will never notice those wave effects. So, in a sense, we are all waves of matter kind of interacting with other waves of matter. But with wavelengths so small, it's as if that wave action didn't matter. So if you wanted to use wave particle duality to actually have some effect in a, a sport, you'd have to be on the microscopic level.

• 7:46Charles Liu?

  I might imagine someday in the future where instead of playing video games like this, there might be a special kind of video game that you were zooming in and looking at a tiny subatomic realm, in a sense.

• 8:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, well Chuck, let's, let's just blow that out and say, all right. So let's say in the future, we have such power over the universe that we can change the value of the physical constants. And so now I've created-

• 8:12Charles Liu?

  Within a small area of the universe.

• 8:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, no, no, I've created a quantum stadium. And in that stadium, Planck's constant is really large. And so, so you start getting these quantum effects with regular everyday objects and people and phenomenon. So tell me, what sport would you devise that could be like a quantum Olympic entry?

• 8:36Charles Liu?

  Oh, well, okay. Um, not to get extra geeky on you on that.

• 8:41Gary O'Reilly?

  Go geeky.

• 8:43Charles Liu?

  If you were to increase Planck's constant to that level, you'd also have massive fluctuations of energy within that stadium. So that at any given time, something equivalent to a, a nuclear explosion would go off right in front of one of your players. And so that's something that you don't want.

• 8:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a game I want to go to. So you're saying bad idea is what you're saying?

• 9:04Charles Liu?

  Well, I mean, if it were something like Car Wars or, you know, Mad Max or something, where you have cars, all you're trying to do is get from one place to the next and random explosions can be going off in the stadium in any time.

• 9:14Gary O'Reilly?

  See, the sport of the future, Charles, will involve more fan interaction. So if you've got a stadium meal in your quantum stadium. Then all of a sudden they shat whilst the offense is in motion. That then becomes something that derails that offense by moving it.

• 9:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 9:34Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah?

• 9:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So if you get enough people coordinated in their actions, you can influence the outcome of the sport.

• 9:41Charles Liu?

  Well, it's already happening on Twitch, for example, right? So if you have a situation beyond the video realm into the physical realm, then I would devise a sport kind of where you would have an object that could randomly move. And the goal of the team is to grab that object or to otherwise obtain this randomly moving thing.

• 10:06Gary O'Reilly?

  Sounds like Quidditch.

• 10:09Charles Liu?

  You are absolutely right. So maybe, maybe the Quidditch pitch is indeed a quantum stadium, just like you described.

• 10:16Chuck Nice?

  Ah, nice.

• 10:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the birdie or whatever that's called, that's following quantum rules for its position. What's it called?

• 10:21Charles Liu?

  The birdie, the golden snitch.

• 10:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Snitch, excuse me, the snitch.

• 10:27Gary O'Reilly?

  I do like birdie though, that sounds.

• 10:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the golden snitch is, its position in three dimensional, four dimensional space and time is quantum determined because they don't know where it's going next.

• 10:39Charles Liu?

  That would be that case, although presumably in the Harry Potter's world of wizardry. Yeah, it's not quantum determined, but it's magically determined or even sentiently determined. It's not clear if in fact the gold snitch is alive or not.

• 10:52Chuck Nice?

  I was gonna say the golden snitch may have a consciousness because when you look at the way it moves, it's clearly not random. It's trying to evade the players. So you never know.

• 11:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 11:03Chuck Nice?

  But in a quantum world, it could pop in and out of existence, which would be, it would be even cooler.

• 11:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Totally cool if you add a, if you add a fourth dimension of time in there.

• 11:11Charles Liu?

  If you entangled the golden snitch.

• 11:14Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 11:14Charles Liu?

  So that it could instantaneously provide information somewhere else. Uh, that would be almost like teleportation.

• 11:22Chuck Nice?

  Right. So it could just like be in one part of the stadium and then when you go to reach it, it's gone and then it's over there now. Or that'd be kind of cool.

• 11:29Gary O'Reilly?

  Eesam, I hope that's your answer, fella.

• 11:34Chuck Nice?

  I mean, how, how deep does this rabbit hole go?

• 11:38Charles Liu?

  Oh, yeah.

• 11:38Gary O'Reilly?

  Let's find out.

• 11:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, now, if I can add an addendum to this, if I may, Charles. Uh, in recent years, uh, was it, uh, who's the guy who plays Ant-Man?

• 11:50Charles Liu?

  Oh, Scott Lang, Paul Rudd.

• 11:52Chuck Nice?

  No, Paul Rudd.

• 11:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Paul Rudd, I think, collaborated with Stephen Hawking to create quant- the rules for quantum chess.

• 12:01Charles Liu?

  Aha.

• 12:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where, when you try to take a piece, there's a probability that that piece is a different piece or is not even there. And so you're judging what the likelihood is of the success of that move will be at every time you make a move. So you can Google it, quantum chess, it's pretty cool.

• 12:20Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 12:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Season two of Queen's Gambit, right there. There you go.

• 12:26Charles Liu?

  Well, let's not get into Ant-Man and, and quantum stuff, because that's a whole nother.

• 12:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Someone might ask, well, yeah, let's, let's get to the, to the questions, okay.

• 12:36Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 12:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So.

• 12:38Chuck Nice?

  Okay, all right.

• 12:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so Chuck, you're next.

• 12:40Chuck Nice?

  Okay, here we go.

• 12:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did you finally reboot your, your iPad?

• 12:43Chuck Nice?

  I rebooted my, my little iPad, and so I'm good now. Okay, so, um, this is from, uh, uh, Violetta, she's 12 years old. Oh. Oh, fabulous. Yes, and, uh, she has a story that's too long to read, but thank you for the story.

• 12:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, by the way, by the way, just a quick thing.

• 13:01Chuck Nice?

  Uh-huh.

• 13:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Violetta is, I guess, is little Violet, right? So, um, you know the rhyme, roses are red? So I, every five years, I tweet, roses are red, violets are violet.

• 13:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Period.

• 13:15Charles Liu?

  Unless you don't have very strong sensitivity in the ultraviolet or the violet spectrum, in which case they actually look blue.

• 13:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The tweet is not intended for people with limited sight.

• 13:25Chuck Nice?

  For Charles' Liu.

• 13:27Charles Liu?

  I'm wearing blue blocker glasses, right?

• 13:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right.

• 13:29Charles Liu?

  The UV, UV blocking glasses.

• 13:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 13:31Charles Liu?

  Violets are blue.

• 13:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what does Violetta have to say? She's 12 years old, very cool.

• 13:34Chuck Nice?

  Okay, and, uh, she's, she's, she basically says.

• 13:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait a minute, is she a Patreon member? Wait a minute.

• 13:40Chuck Nice?

  Yes. Her mom is? It's Violetta and mum.

• 13:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And mum, okay, all right, good.

• 13:45Chuck Nice?

  And mum Izzy, uh, is a Patreon member, and. Uh, for, for that, we say, thanks for the money. Yes.

• 13:53Chuck Nice?

  You romantic.

• 13:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, it's thanks for your support.

• 13:56Chuck Nice?

  Oh, I'm sorry. Well, you know, see, that's, I know, now, now I'm giving myself away because people are just like, I support you. I'm like, I don't need your support. I want your money.

• 14:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That reminds me of Pearl Bailey once said during, uh, Pearl Bailey old, um, singer, actors. Uh, she said on, on Valentine's Day, um, honey, on Valentine's Day, I want a five pound box of money.

• 14:25Chuck Nice?

  I love it. You all know the Beatles song Money, right? Yes. Yeah, right. Money can't buy everything is true, but what can't buy, I can't use. I need your money. I need money. That's what I want. All together now.

• 14:40Chuck Nice?

  All right. So here's Violetta. She says.

• 14:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Who's never heard of the Beatles or Pearl Bailey.

• 14:44Chuck Nice?

  Oh, I doubt it. I'll bet she has. Well, she has now. This is great. Um, uh, she's talking about STEM and to her STEM should be STEM with a B on the end that is silent. That stands for baseball. Yes. And, oh, look at Chuck Lou. Chuck Lou's excited about that. What a sport. Okay. Uh, so science, uh, tech, engineering, math and baseball. And, and she says this, Dr. Lou, I am wondering as far as the physics may go, are there any skills that you can think of that might give women a particular advantage in baseball? Maybe like rather than trying to throw the fast pitch, developing interesting off speed pitches instead. Can you think of any other areas of untapped baseball physics that players of any gender

• 15:29Chuck Nice?

  haven't yet explored to their fullest potential? P S. I love all the StarTalk episodes and having you as a guest. You always are so gracious and your answers to questions are fascinating. Thank you for being you.

• 15:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Signed, Charles Liu's mom.

• 15:46Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh.

• 15:48Chuck Nice?

  Oh.

• 15:51Gary O'Reilly?

  Hey Chuck, Violetta does say, and in all modesty, and she's talking about, I play baseball and I'm just saying, "I'm pretty good." Oh yeah, for guys who started, "I'm pretty good."

• 16:04Charles Liu?

  All right, good for you, Violetta.

• 16:05Gary O'Reilly?

  Love that.

• 16:06Charles Liu?

  Oh, Violet and Izzy, thank you so much for the question. Thank you for your kind words. It's very sweet. Baseball is a tremendous sport and it is a wonderful way to learn STEM, actually. There are so many intricacies of it and so much of it requires scientific understanding, not just hitting home runs, right? But your question is very, very good. A lot of people have...

• 16:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And Chuck's got two minutes, so be tight. Okay, go.

• 16:31Charles Liu?

  People have this preconceived notion that you have to have a certain body type or certain way of playing individual sports. And for baseball, that's one of the sports where any kind of body type or any kind of thing that you can bring to the table that's unique can help you stand out.

• 16:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exhibit A, Babe Ruth, body built on beer and hot dogs.

• 16:53Charles Liu?

  Yes. So I would say, for example, if you are looking for a typical female physique, yes, your pitching will allow you, you might be able to have unusual pitches because you're able to have the ball leave your hand or your whole arm structure in a different way. If you're running the bases, for example, you may be able to, through flexibility or through other kinds of training, be able to dodge tags if you're trying to steal a base. Or you might be able to leap in the field, find certain ways to grab things and throw better.

• 17:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Chuck, this would be a flexibility that women tend to enjoy in more ways than men do.

• 17:35Charles Liu?

  Statistically speaking, that's true. That's right. And also things like, so for throwing a ball, for example, your fingers. And then, of course, there's the strike zone, right? The strike zone is supposedly from your shoulders to your knees. So it doesn't matter how big or how small you are. If you're able to reach a ball in the strike zone, it's always going to be roughly a level playing field. And in some senses, for example, they're famous...

• 17:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Except for where the pitching mound is, that's raised.

• 18:00Charles Liu?

  Right. The mound was actually lowered.

• 18:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, I'm trying to be, do, put jokes in here and where are you?

• 18:09Chuck Nice?

  You know, that's, I mean, you're, you're talking about field technicalities.

• 18:13Charles Liu?

  That's right. Well, the, the mound was lowered in the sixties because Bob Gibson had his ridiculous, oh, seventies, because of Bob Gibson's ridiculous 1.12 ERA back when he was pitching for the Cardinals that year. But yeah, so, uh, there are very famous, uh, players who have such good crouches that their strike zones were small and it gave them an advantage in hitting. So it may well be the case that you can take advantage of that if your body type or your physique, uh, matches that of the,

• 18:40Chuck Nice?

  How about a woman's lower center of gravity? Would that come into play in any way, shape or form?

• 18:45Charles Liu?

  In baseball, I could only imagine that if you're trying to field a hot ground ball to third base or something like that, that you might be able to move laterally more effectively than someone whose body mass is more weighted toward the top because you have to move more of your mass a larger distance in order to go sideways.

• 19:02Gary O'Reilly?

  Charles, would that not help with hitting a lower center, center of gravity where you were able to get under a pitch and hit it up?

• 19:09Charles Liu?

  Right. Well, uh, in baseball, uh, most hitters are taught not to get under the ball, uh, to try to lift a ball, fly ball, but rather hit the ball levelly.

• 19:18Chuck Nice?

  You just want to make contact.

• 19:20Charles Liu?

  Right. And, and have strong level contact. So yes, if you're lower and a pitcher can't quite get the ball down or is trying to get the ball down so that you only hit ground balls, you may be able, uh, to be more flexible either with your crouch or just have a smaller height to be able to hit the ball where you want it to go because you have a better opportunity to pick off the ball before it does its break or before it gets too low.

• 19:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And people with famously high lifetime batting averages were not statistically larger than your average baseball players. I mean, you look at.

• 19:51Charles Liu?

  Maybe the best example is Wade Boggs, uh, who was famous for having a low crouch and his lifetime batting average was tremendous. Then one year he decided to prove to people that he could actually hit the long ball also because he was tired of people saying, yeah, all you do is hit line drives. And he wound up having a great year hitting home runs. So he just proved that.

• 20:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And also with the lower center of mass, not all plays at the plate is the ball exactly where it needs to be for the tag. So the catch. We'll have to catch it and then move lower to a lower position. And so if you're already down there, that could give you a few extra scoring opportunities because of that. But excellent, Chuck. We gotta take a quick, we gotta take a quick break. When we come back, more StarTalk Cosmic Queries, the physics of sports.

• 21:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back. StarTalk Sports Edition, Cosmic Queries, the physics of sport. Love that subject. And Gary and Chuck are giving us questions from our fanbase and handing them to our resident geek-in-chief, friend and colleague, Charles New.

• 21:15Charles Liu?

  Nice.

• 21:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright. Alright, so who's next? Who's next up? Is it Chuck? You got a question for him?

• 21:21Gary O'Reilly?

  Uh, thank Gary. Okay, I'll jump in. Right, this one, another one of our Patreon patrons, Cameron Bishop. Hi, guys. I have a question about motorsports, specifically Formula One.

• 21:34Gary O'Reilly?

  How, oh, Charles is already excited. How would we need to adapt our cars, which are already very complicated engineering feats for a Grand Prix hosted somewhere like Mars?

• 21:47Charles Liu?

  Well, first you have to make sure that Lewis Hamilton is wearing a helmet. Otherwise, he won't be able to breathe very well. But beyond that, Formula One, it has primarily improved car performance over the years by becoming more and more aerodynamic.

• 22:03Gary O'Reilly?

  Right.

• 22:03Charles Liu?

  Right? They're using airplane technology to make sure that the cars actually stay on the road better, that they can turn corners better, and just go faster.

• 22:11Chuck Nice?

  The car is flying in reverse.

• 22:14Charles Liu?

  Literally, yes.

• 22:15Chuck Nice?

  It's flying in reverse.

• 22:16Charles Liu?

  It's a really good way to say it. The problem is, of course, Mars has your.

• 22:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Charles, I think the future of Formula One should be rocket engines. I'm sorry. That's just me. That's just me. You know, solid rocket boosters. NASA should sponsor Formula One and strap on some SRBs. And then it wins every time.

• 22:31Chuck Nice?

  How much are you in a corner?

• 22:32Charles Liu?

  Here's, here's, here's the. The cornering is the problem. Gary is exactly right. I was gonna say. Because it's not a drag race, right? It actually requires some, some skill and finesse here.

• 22:43Chuck Nice?

  So here's, here's the first post-race interview after Neil's, after Neil's thing. It's like, so it was an interesting experiment. Uh, what are those, uh, what are all those marks on the wall?

• 22:56Charles Liu?

  Uh, yeah.

• 22:57Chuck Nice?

  Those, those are the cars.

• 22:59Charles Liu?

  That just makes the first.

• 23:01Chuck Nice?

  You mean where the cars, where the cars hit? No, those are the actual cars.

• 23:05Gary O'Reilly?

  Can you, can you imagine a rocket-powered Formula One Grand Prix in Monte Carlo?

• 23:11Charles Liu?

  Oh, my God.

• 23:13Gary O'Reilly?

  The cars sticking out of buildings.

• 23:15Charles Liu?

  Oh, that'd be terrible. Yeah.

• 23:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I gotta work on that detail.

• 23:18Charles Liu?

  But, but you're on to something, Neil, because, because, for example, on Mars, the atmospheric pressure is less than 1% that of the atmospheric pressure here on Earth. So, uh, internal combustion engines wouldn't work. So you would have to have something like a rocket.

• 23:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so what you're trying to do is, you need, you need some device that will steal more air from its surroundings than would otherwise be naturally fed to the engine.

• 23:46Chuck Nice?

  Because you need that, that is the actual propulsion. It's the induction of air and then the combustion out the back.

• 23:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the cavity that then sends it out the back.

• 23:56Chuck Nice?

  Right. So, so, okay, that makes sense.

• 23:58Charles Liu?

  And so that way, a rocket engine might actually be the best solution. So you can avoid the issue of atmosphere altogether. Because after all, most of the atmosphere in Mars is carbon dioxide, which won't help you with a jet engine as we understand them anyway.

• 24:10Gary O'Reilly?

  But what that bloating effect in the environment, we haven't done that good a job here. Are we now going to export that to Mars?

• 24:16Charles Liu?

  It would be a, an environmental disaster. I agree.

• 24:19Gary O'Reilly?

  Fabulous, let's do that then.

• 24:21Charles Liu?

  Yeah, but then cars would not need to be nearly so aerodynamic either. So you would have to focus on control, your ability to stay on the road when you're going at ridiculous speeds.

• 24:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a fascinating point, Charles. So because the atmospheric pressure is so low, aerodynamics is, you could have like a-

• 24:38Chuck Nice?

  You don't have the resistance.

• 24:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, you don't need air foils and funny funky shapes.

• 24:43Charles Liu?

  It would be a 1% effect, as opposed to a much larger effect.

• 24:46Gary O'Reilly?

  So we'd be racing Mercedes G wagons, which have the aerodynamics of a brick.

• 24:53Chuck Nice?

  A box.

• 24:54Charles Liu?

  That's great. Yeah, you would not have to worry about the shape of your vehicle nearly so much. You want instead to know the shape would be depending on whether or not you can grip the road, whether you can make the turns at very high speeds and things like that. Some of the physics is very similar. You want a low center of gravity, you want good traction, things like that. But the power ratio compared with the shape structure would be very different.

• 25:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Charles, if you're, because the gravity is less, it's like 40% of Earth's gravity, does that affect the slope of the bank turns, if you have a bank turn at all?

• 25:28Charles Liu?

  It would.

• 25:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm thinking NASCAR really there.

• 25:30Charles Liu?

  Yes, it would because you have bank turns. But remember that the issue of your angular momentum is more important when you're going at very high speed than the gravitational pull, right? Because your gravity, you're going to- Their car is literally going to be like the sand in a bucket that is being swung up and down at the beach. You're going to stay on regardless of whether or not you have the gravity pulling on you because your angular momentum is so much greater.

• 26:01Gary O'Reilly?

  So if I go up a hill at 200 plus miles per hour on Mars, am I likely to stay on the ground once I reach the peak? Or have I gone, I want to say airborne, but that's not quite-

• 26:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, you want to go into orbit, Gary? Is that what you're trying to do?

• 26:15Gary O'Reilly?

  No, I'm just gonna say, how are we working that out in terms of avoiding me to-

• 26:19Charles Liu?

  If I were to do the physics real quick in my head, 200 miles an hour, you would fly off, yes. You'd have to be almost vertical in order not to fly off. You'd still rise quite up high.

• 26:30Gary O'Reilly?

  So the race would have to be slower?

• 26:32Charles Liu?

  Uh, the race would be slower or the slopes would have to be higher if you're banking your curves, right?

• 26:36Gary O'Reilly?

  To keep you on.

• 26:37Charles Liu?

  Think about Olympus Mons, right? The, the tallest volcano on Mars. Uh, that thing is many times taller than Mount Everest. Because the gravitational, uh, acceleration at the surface of Mars is lower than that on Earth. So these mountains can rise higher. So that's what you'd have to do with the banks on a, say a NASCAR.

• 26:56Gary O'Reilly?

  Race to the top of, uh, that volcano.

• 26:58Charles Liu?

  That would be something.

• 26:59Gary O'Reilly?

  Everest Mons.

• 27:00Charles Liu?

  That's a, that's a Grand Prix, uh, for sure, all right.

• 27:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, all right.

• 27:03Chuck Nice?

  All right, cool, man. All right. Next, okay. Let's, uh, let's move on to.

• 27:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, no, let me just add to, to follow up quickly on Chuck's point. This reason why the, the, the combustion engines have trouble is the same reason why regular airplanes, there's a limit to how high they can fly.

• 27:20Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 27:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  At any given speed, because they have to suck enough air to make that, the jet engine phenomenon work. So, yeah, we take so much for granted down here at sea level of what's going on.

• 27:34Chuck Nice?

  Right. Super cool. Uh, and, yeah, okay. Uh, so planes can be like Icarus, is what you're saying.

• 27:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 27:42Charles Liu?

  Well, but instead of being burned by the sun, they run out of air.

• 27:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Run out of air and fall, yeah, yeah.

• 27:47Chuck Nice?

  All right, here we go. Uh, this is, Ruwan was here and he says, how the heck does one throw a curve ball? What physics is going on there?

• 27:56Charles Liu?

  Oh.

• 27:57Chuck Nice?

  Ruwan wants to know.

• 28:00Charles Liu?

  Uh, I would say, you know what? I'm gonna throw this to Gary a little bit because, uh, throwing curve ball, the reason the ball curves is very similar to the reason a soccer ball curves when it gets kicked. And, and so, uh, I want the, uh, true athlete to sort of explain why the ball curves. And then I can bring on the physics for the, the baseball in particular.

• 28:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You mean, you want Gary to say what he has to do to make the ball curve?

• 28:24Charles Liu?

  Yes, exactly.

• 28:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You'll give the physics to that, so Gary.

• 28:27Charles Liu?

  I would like to do that.

• 28:28Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay, um, when I was.

• 28:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, first of all, Gary, why would you want to? First of all, Gary, why would you want to curve a soccer ball? Don't you want to just kick it straight in?

• 28:36Gary O'Reilly?

  No, no, so, okay. In a certain time, um, I want to disable the, say, the goal goalkeeper, the goal minder, and have them think the ball is going from left to right. And therefore they move that way and then the ball just comes back in from right to left.

• 28:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, so they're committing their body momentum in the wrong direction.

• 28:56Gary O'Reilly?

  So once I get the body weight loaded to one side in particular, it's going to be very difficult for them to

• 29:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gary, that's just wrong. That's just not nice.

• 29:03Gary O'Reilly?

  Hence, hence my prefix of this is devious.

• 29:06Charles Liu?

  And when it works, do you go, ha ha, tricked you like that?

• 29:09Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh, absolutely. Yeah. And I mean, that's, it is another thing is the route to goal may be blocked. You see this in free kicks.

• 29:20Charles Liu?

  Yeah.

• 29:21Gary O'Reilly?

  Where they build a wall to protect the goal and then all of a sudden.

• 29:25Charles Liu?

  And then they use their hands to protect their private parts.

• 29:28Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, of course. Yeah.

• 29:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So famous cells are the wall.

• 29:30Gary O'Reilly?

  One must protect the crown jewels at all times. Right? So, um, and the most famous free kick in recent times was Roberto Carlos against France. I think it's 97, France versus Brazil or Brazil versus France.

• 29:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, 1997 is recent times? That's 23 years ago.

• 29:50Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, I think we addressed the point.

• 29:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm a thousand years old, so 23 years ago was recent.

• 29:56Charles Liu?

  I remember that goal. It was ridiculous. Yeah.

• 29:59Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah. And in answer to your question, Neil, you can carbon date me after the show.

• 30:05Gary O'Reilly?

  So Roberto Carlos comes up to the ball outside of his left foot. He's now addressing, he's coming up to the ball, addressing the ball on the right hand side. So is he going to kick it with his left foot? He hits it on the outside of the ball on the right hand side. Now, if you imagine the ball has an imaginary equator, he's got to hit right on the equatorial point. But in towards the slightly more into the middle so as he can get power to make it travel the distance. But because he hits across it, he imparts this spin, this rotation. And you can see from a camera behind the wall.

• 30:44Gary O'Reilly?

  It deviates by about two yards or more. It is going wide of the goal. And then all of a sudden, it cuts back in in a most vicious way. The goalkeeper is a World Cup winning goalkeeper, uh, Bartez, who, uh, if you can imagine this, looks a little bit like the, the old Hollywood actor Donald Pleasence. Um, who was a Bond villain, if I'm not mistaken. There you go. But more famously for being, I think it was Cindy Crawford's partner at some stage. There you go. There's your, there's your sad nugget of information.

• 31:20Charles Liu?

  Not sad for Donald Pleasence.

• 31:22Gary O'Reilly?

  You know what? I, I, yes, in answer. So Charles, we were taught you can't hit too fine. You have to make contact in the meat of the ball, but if you hit lower, the ball will spin and rise. If you kind of hit across that equatorial plane, it will stay in a lower trajectory and travel. And you'll make more contact with the ball and therefore impart more power and force through the ball.

• 31:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. So if you, if you kick it on the right side, giving it kind of like from the top, a counterclockwise spin, it'll then veer left.

• 31:57Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes.

• 31:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 31:58Gary O'Reilly?

  And you will angle your run to approach it. So as you, you really do slice across it, but with such power.

• 32:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And there's a, and there's a trade off.

• 32:07Gary O'Reilly?

  Thirty yards.

• 32:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's a trade off between maximizing the spin by hitting it just at the outer edge and giving, putting some meat on the kick to, to have the thing move forward. So Charles, this is why I guess, uh, uh, curve balls are never as fast as fast balls.

• 32:22Charles Liu?

  Correct.

• 32:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because so, some of the energy.

• 32:24Charles Liu?

  Exactly right.

• 32:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The pitcher's using is going to spin it.

• 32:27Charles Liu?

  You are a hundred percent correct. And Gary, thank you. That was just a, an excellent explanation was going on.

• 32:31Gary O'Reilly?

  You're welcome.

• 32:32Charles Liu?

  Yeah.

• 32:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  From the recent goal 23 years ago. Yeah.

• 32:37Charles Liu?

  But still most likely immortal. Uh, one of the most amazing goals ever. Uh, except maybe the 86 Diego Maradona goal in the World Cup, but that didn't have as much to do with aerodynamics.

• 32:47Gary O'Reilly?

  Against England, so we do not.

• 32:51Charles Liu?

  That was not as much aerodynamics as just ridiculous skill, but that's a, that's another story. Uh, and then there was the hand goal headed that, but let, let's let that aside. As you said.

• 33:00Gary O'Reilly?

  Please do.

• 33:01Charles Liu?

  It was against England. Okay.

• 33:04Charles Liu?

  The curve ball requires that the pitcher push the ball a little bit sideways as it's being thrown, giving it a twist and not pushing it straight on as hard as you can right in the middle. Uh, because the baseball, like the soccer ball, is not a perfect sphere. It can then interact as it spins with the air that it encounters on the way to the plate.

• 33:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, it's not that the ball is oblong, you mean the surface is textured.

• 33:31Charles Liu?

  The surface is ever so different.

• 33:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's not a perfectly smooth sphere, it's textured, yeah.

• 33:35Charles Liu?

  That's right, that's the right way to put it. And so as a result, you can create the curve action. Now with a baseball, it's considered a rigid body, right? It doesn't change its shape nearly as much as a soccer ball does. So when you hit the ball, the soccer ball, uh, the deformation of the soccer ball provides an even greater change, which is why you can have this sort of L-shaped turn. With a curve ball, you just kind of get a little bit of a "yee" kind of thing. Uh, that's a different scale of motion and also the distances are a lot different.

• 34:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what's happening with the forces on the ball? With the air and the forces?

• 34:07Charles Liu?

  You have the spin, which is creating, uh, non-laminar flow around the ball. And then the laces of the baseball, uh, accentuate that point. So the more you spin it, the more likely it's gonna happen. If you had a perfectly smooth, uniform baseball, then the ball may not curve, uh, no matter how much spin you put on it, because there isn't the opportunity to disturb the air.

• 34:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So when you disturb the air, it creates an unequal force, left and right on the ball.

• 34:34Charles Liu?

  Right, or up and down for that matter.

• 34:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or up and down, right, right.

• 34:37Gary O'Reilly?

  Another level of deviousness.

• 34:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The sinking or the rising fastball will do that, right?

• 34:42Charles Liu?

  That's right.

• 34:43Gary O'Reilly?

  So another level of deviousness for the soccer player, and it's, it's all about deviousness. A baseball is a solid object. A soccer ball is inflated. I know you're ahead of me on this, but the aperture in which you inflate the ball, if you strike through that... You then have Charles in my right, some sort of presser change and you have a definite impact unintended on the defamation of the ball and it will knuckle as in a baseball pitch.

• 35:10Charles Liu?

  That's right. So, so when you see people setting up the soccer ball for a penalty kick or a free kick, you always notice that the place where you stick the inflating pin in is somewhere where the

• 35:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The valve.

• 35:22Charles Liu?

  Yeah, somewhere where the player can actually hit it with the foot. Yeah, it's pretty amazing.

• 35:27Chuck Nice?

  And the most devious thing is in baseball, if the pitcher actually kicks the ball towards the plate.

• 35:34Charles Liu?

  Or spits on it. Spits on it. Remember the spitball?

• 35:38Chuck Nice?

  Well, yeah.

• 35:39Charles Liu?

  I don't know if you were around back then, but the

• 35:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gary surely was.

• 35:44Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 35:45Charles Liu?

  Let's be super harsh now. The last baseball pitcher in the major leagues who was allowed to throw a spitball, I believe was Satchel Paige, because everyone who used to throw spitballs were grandfathered in and allowed to do it thereafter. If you put water on the ball and then you throw it with whatever spin you have, you even create even more change because that changes the aerodynamics, it changes the ability for the ball to go through, like what's slippery and what's not. You also create water that kind of comes out and it changes the trajectory. It was, spitballs are ridiculous. They're terrible. And then you try to hit the ball, the ball hits the bat and the ball's slippery. So it's going to go swirling away.

• 36:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So there's a spitball and then there's the hock-a-loogie ball.

• 36:30Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 36:31Charles Liu?

  You mean the illegal ball, the blob of stuff coming, right? And the batter's like, oh, look at that.

• 36:38Chuck Nice?

  I'm not hitting that. I'm not hitting that.

• 36:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Guys, we gotta wrap, we gotta cut that for a second and final break. And when we come back, we'll have more StarTalk Sports Edition, Cosmic Queries, The Physics of Sports.

• 37:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back, StarTalk, Sports Edition, Cosmic Queries, the Physics of Sports. And while I know a little bit of this, you knew we brought in our resident geek-in-chief, Charles Liu. Charles?

• 37:28Charles Liu?

  What a pleasure to be here, thank you.

• 37:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's there, okay. So let's continue this. Gary and Chuck, what questions you have?

• 37:34Chuck Nice?

  Uh, here it is. This is from Stephen Summers. He's a Patreon patron, and he wants to know this. Uh, greetings, Doctors, uh, of Space Comedy. Uh, question for-

• 37:44Gary O'Reilly?

  Hey!

• 37:48Chuck Nice?

  Uh, he says, "Questions for Dr. Liu. I'm involved in a high-stakes game of Dom-Jot later today against some nasty, uh, uh-"

• 38:00Charles Liu?

  That'd be Na- Nausikins?

• 38:02Chuck Nice?

  Nausikins, yeah.

• 38:03Charles Liu?

  Yeah, they love Dom-Jot.

• 38:04Chuck Nice?

  Not to be confused with snausages.

• 38:08Chuck Nice?

  "Now, I need an ad," he says. "Any recommendations? Should I turn off the grav plating, or create a spatial anomaly, or just keep my phaser set to extra crispy?"

• 38:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, what the hell was that?

• 38:23Charles Liu?

  What a great question.

• 38:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What was that?

• 38:26Charles Liu?

  Dom-Jot. Dom-Jot is a game in the Star Trek: Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, uh, universe, okay, which is some sort of a mix between, uh, pool and pinball, okay? Uh, it was introduced in Star Trek's, uh, Next Generation, Season 7, Episode Tapestry, which is kind of like, uh, It's a Wonderful Life-

• 38:49Chuck Nice?

  Charles, why do you know this?

• 38:51Gary O'Reilly?

  Because he's a geek!

• 38:53Chuck Nice?

  What do you- Charles!

• 38:56Charles Liu?

  But in this episode, yes, uh, Jean-Luc Picard, played by Patrick Stewart, is kind of like Jimmy Stewart, and it's a one, sort of, lives his past, as if he were able to make different decisions and so forth. But in that, uh, the, the, the Nausikins are a bunch of really, you know, big-looking, scary-looking thugs, uh, and they want to play Dom-Jot. Uh, yeah. Uh, Dom-Jot, you know, play human, play Dom-Jot, and so they're playing this stuff. But they cheated, and so-

• 39:23Chuck Nice?

  No!

• 39:24Charles Liu?

  Yeah, so, uh-

• 39:27Charles Liu?

  He was cheating too, and it's all kinds of funny things like that. So, so let me just answer very quickly. Uh, it's a great question, but I would never countenance anyone trying to stack the deck and cheat, especially against some angry Nosecans, because they will rip off your appendages if they get that angry. So I would say to try to play and beat them fair and square. It is well known that Nosecans always try to roll the Tarric into straight nines. They always want that because it's like considered a cool thing for them way beyond the importance of it in the game.

• 40:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I knew that, I knew that. Chuck, you knew that too, right? Yeah, but I'm telling.

• 40:04Charles Liu?

  So play to block Nosecans' attempts to roll the Tarric into straight nines. And they will take silly risks, which will then allow you to sort of piecemeal win this game. Uh, now, be sure, however, if you're careful, uh, if you're playing, for example, on Deep Space Nine in quarks, make sure that Odo is there to provide enough security so that the Nosecans do not rip off your appendages.

• 40:29Chuck Nice?

  And here's the real answer. Be sure not to ask this question if you don't have a girlfriend. Because, because what you need to do, what you need to do is go get a girlfriend first. And then you can ask this kind of question, okay? See, that's, that's the real answer. You better have a girlfriend is, is the answer to this question.

• 40:52Charles Liu?

  I don't know Chuck, I, I suspect that, I suspect that question and answer might help attract a girlfriend.

• 41:00Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, unfortunately, only female Nosecans will be attracted to that question.

• 41:04Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay, so Stephen, you, you have the choice of two answers.

• 41:12Chuck Nice?

  All right, let's move on. What do you got?

• 41:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, let's do, we gotta do lightning round.

• 41:15Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, lightning round. The minimal-

• 41:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so Charles, give me like soundbite answers. Okay.

• 41:20Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, here's a question from the minimalistic soul. How to get strength back with minimal efforts? I'll answer this one. Take steroids. Next.

• 41:31Charles Liu?

  You want a real, real answer?

• 41:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 41:33Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes, go ahead.

• 41:34Charles Liu?

  Strength, uh, repetition, uh, of different muscle groups at various lengths and long periods, over long periods of time.

• 41:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As a training regimen.

• 41:44Charles Liu?

  As a training regimen.

• 41:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, yes, so that when you actually are called to task on that, you will recover more quickly.

• 41:50Charles Liu?

  Correct.

• 41:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, okay, all right.

• 41:52Chuck Nice?

  All right, here we go. This is, this is Andrew Gundry, Gundry. He said it, Chuck, if you pronounce it like gumbo, you got it. Get on T, get on T. Here we go. So he says, he says, hey, guys, a common criticism for the introduction of science into sports is that it can take away from the soul of the game, potentially ruining the challenge faced by the athletes and the enjoyment experienced by the fans. How should we evaluate whether the introduction of science or data or AI will be truly good for the overall sport or whether it will improve individual players' performance but ruin the overall game? So when does it, when does it make the game better and more enjoyable?

• 42:35Chuck Nice?

  And when does it detract from the enjoyment by making the game better?

• 42:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Soundbite answer, Charles.

• 42:40Charles Liu?

  This is the lightning round question? Oh, my God.

• 42:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And show all work. Compare and contrast.

• 42:47Charles Liu?

  Here's the soundbite answer. The more science makes a game or a sport fun, the more it's good. If you try to put anything into a sport or a game that makes it less fun, whether it's, you know, steroids or unfortunate training or whatever, or science, it'll make it less fun. But if we can add the science and say, look, this makes the game more fun, which science does, if you do it right, then we have no problem.

• 43:16Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay, I'll give you the answer. The athlete's answer is this. Does this give me an advantage? Can I win? Let's have it.

• 43:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 43:23Gary O'Reilly?

  Simple as, I'm in for winning.

• 43:26Chuck Nice?

  Well, there you go.

• 43:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, we're all of the age when we remembered when the electronic, I think IBM was the first to do with the electronic tracking of whether a tennis ball hits the line in or out. All right, that's science applied to a sport. Did that make it more or less fun?

• 43:41Charles Liu?

  I think it made it more fun unless you're Yvonne Lendl or John McEnroe, right?

• 43:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Unless you like watching them argue.

• 43:48Charles Liu?

  Yeah, right.

• 43:49Chuck Nice?

  Oh, that's so funny. John McEnroe nowadays would be, he, what are you? What are you, blind? What? Shut up, John. Shut up. The computer said it's out.

• 44:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, I may be blind, but the computer isn't. So get that back on.

• 44:04Gary O'Reilly?

  Computer said no.

• 44:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 44:06Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, um.

• 44:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Next.

• 44:08Gary O'Reilly?

  Stay. This question is from StayPunctual. Uh, how do pro basketball?

• 44:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  From what, from what, uh, Instagram?

• 44:15Gary O'Reilly?

  This is Instagram, sorry. Uh, okay, StayPunctual. How do pro basketball players have muscle memory or to make seemingly impossible shots?

• 44:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hmm.

• 44:26Charles Liu?

  Uh, well, uh, I would say that's probably practice, practice, practice. Uh, muscle memory is a thing, although it's not physically a thing so much. Your brain actually can pattern in things that it's done before. Whether it's in sports or in arts or music or science or anything like that. So if you do it over and over enough times, then your body knows at that moment what to do, what combination of signals to send from your brain to your body to get those things to happen. And then, uh, there's also the point where you have improvisation. If you have different sequences in your head already set, you know how to take a shot and you know how to spin and you know how to dunk, then you can combine them together.

• 45:12Charles Liu?

  If your brain has done it often enough, almost instantaneously to a jump and a spin and a dunk all in sequence.

• 45:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cool. So what you're saying is I don't have to invent a new sequence. I just have to staple together other fragments of the sequence that I've already perfected and to everyone else it'll look like it's something new.

• 45:28Charles Liu?

  Well, that's my understanding of the sports physics of the brain. Uh, but you know, new, new understanding about how our brains and our bodies work is coming every day. So I may be already way behind on the curve.

• 45:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cool. And like that scene where, uh, where, uh, Michael Jordan is at the, at the foul line and he just closes his eyes and shoots.

• 45:46Charles Liu?

  Yeah.

• 45:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then it's, it's a complete, it's all net. That, I would call that muscle memory. I would call that. Or magic, one or the other. Alright, let's keep this going. We're in lightning round. Go.

• 45:58Chuck Nice?

  Here we go.

• 45:58Charles Liu?

  Get a Patreon.

• 45:59Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. This is Tyson Liu 2019. Oh, interesting.

• 46:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, wow.

• 46:05Chuck Nice?

  So he says, uh, hockey skates, blade contact. Are we actually on the ice? Or are we on a layer of water? What is it?

• 46:12Charles Liu?

  Hmm. Good question. Uh, it turns out that it's complicated. It can be either or both. There's been a long, uh, held belief that the reason you wind up being able to skate is because temporarily the ice skate pushes against the ice and creates a thin layer of water as it goes by. But it's more complicated than that. If you do the physics, that alone usually isn't enough. So surface physics is a part of physics which we haven't done a really good job in understanding the models thereof. So it's a combination of solid on solid and liquid on solid. And that's why, uh, it's such a dicey thing to do when you're playing hockey or when you're doing figure skating. It's not always the same physics that's causing your skate to move.

• 46:54Charles Liu?

  And therefore you have to adjust physically with your muscles to make sure that you're going where you want to go.

• 46:59Chuck Nice?

  Wow. Okay.

• 47:00Gary O'Reilly?

  All right. This from Instagram. Jeff Calafat. What happens when a basketball seems to enter a, enter the hoop, but suddenly rolls out?

• 47:10Chuck Nice?

  No.

• 47:10Charles Liu?

  Oh.

• 47:12Chuck Nice?

  Uh, I'll tell you what happens. I lose $200. Thanks LeBron. Thanks. Thanks LeBron.

• 47:20Charles Liu?

  Well, um, the ball is always spinning, even if you can't see it on television. So if it hits the rim, it's going to strike at instantaneously at a particular angle. And there's a spin happening at the same time. It is altogether possible, but very unfortunate for Chuck. Right? Uh, that it hit the spin and the rim in just such a way that the reflection angle from that bounce is actually out as opposed to being in. So that's kind of what happens.

• 47:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Charles, this is like if I take a ball and I backspin, take a basketball and I backspin it away from me. If you're just standing and you don't see the spin, it looks like I'm throwing it away, but then it bounces back towards me. So you can create a bounce trajectory that's very non-intuitive if you don't know in advance how the thing is spinning.

• 48:09Charles Liu?

  That's right.

• 48:09Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 48:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so, so it can't go in the net and come out of the net. That, that's not the kind of shot that we're talking about here. It's gotta be able, the rim is a participant.

• 48:19Chuck Nice?

  Gotta hit the rim.

• 48:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's gotta hit the rim in order for it to come back out.

• 48:21Charles Liu?

  Almost certainly, yes. The, the, the net is not strong enough to provide that reflective bounce.

• 48:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, okay, cool.

• 48:28Chuck Nice?

  Cool, man. All right, keep it coming. This is, this is DieGoat93 from Instagram. I love this question. As somebody who has tried to surf, notice operative word, tried. Uh, he says, what is the force that keeps you on your surfboard?

• 48:43Charles Liu?

  Oh, that's not so much force as it is balance, right? Equilibrium. In order to stay still in any reference frame, in this case, the frame of your board, you have to have all your forces balanced to zero in all the other directions. Otherwise you tip, right? So you're using micro adjustments of your body, your arms, your legs, your feet, your toes, in such a way that-

• 49:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Your ass, right.

• 49:09Charles Liu?

  Well, when I'm surfing, that is hard.

• 49:13Charles Liu?

  Such that, uh, if there is a change in the motion of the board, you are exactly balancing that almost instantaneously so that relative to the board, your position and your forces stay constant.

• 49:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So if you're unfamiliar with surfing, it just looks like they're just casually balanced, but you're saying there are micro adjustments that I don't even notice.

• 49:34Charles Liu?

  Incredible muscle power needs to happen in order for this to go on. Uh, it is true that, that I am told, I've never successfully done this myself, that the, the best surfers are one with their board. Which means that they, at some point- need to make almost no adjustments because they intuitively sense where they need to be at any given time with the minimum adjustments necessary to have a zero net force compared to the position of the board.

• 50:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because if there's any force that is net, that will set the whole thing into motion and you'll tip over or something bad will happen.

• 50:09Charles Liu?

  You'll spin, you'll fall, you'll tip.

• 50:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right.

• 50:10Chuck Nice?

  Wow, that's so cool.

• 50:13Gary O'Reilly?

  Silver surfer, the silver surfer, that's completely wrong with the ball.

• 50:17Charles Liu?

  The silver surfer stayed on because of the power cosmic given to him by Galactus to be his first herald, but that again is a different.

• 50:23Chuck Nice?

  I set him up, you knock him down.

• 50:28Charles Liu?

  Fantastic 448, you gotta go back to the, to the historical record.

• 50:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Fantastic one. And one thing about the surfer, could it be then, that if the surfer goes on with hand weights, that they would have higher ability to make adjustments because they have more weight that they can maneuver so that they could survive a wave action that might otherwise topple them?

• 50:55Chuck Nice?

  Like, like a tightrope artist with a balancing frame?

• 50:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For example, very good Chuck, yeah.

• 50:59Charles Liu?

  Very possibly. I, I don't know enough about the specific physics, the nonlinear physics, when you're actually riding a wave, to know whether that's an advantage or a disadvantage, but theoretically that certainly makes sense.

• 51:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, if you have more weight, you can reposition, that should give you more, that's interesting, the future of, the future of, of surfing is you get two, you know, barbed, two dumbbells, two weights.

• 51:22Chuck Nice?

  Or you find some weighted gloves. Yeah, weighted gloves, weighted sleeves. Somebody does weighted gloves or weighted sleeves in their wet suit and they could cheat.

• 51:29Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay, so, stay, stay with this theme, okay, because Cooper Holland has come in on Instagram.

• 51:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This, this might have to be the last question, okay.

• 51:37Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, it's cool. Does being heavier on skis make you faster?

• 51:42Chuck Nice?

  Ooh, fat skiers, watch out Olympics.

• 51:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Fat ski guy.

• 51:49Chuck Nice?

  The fat ski competition.

• 51:55Charles Liu?

  Let me think about that a little bit. On the one hand, a higher mass would cause a greater normal force, which would mean that you, if you have a coefficient of friction that's greater than zero, it will slow you down going down the slope, right? On the other hand, if you have a higher mass, you may be able to tilt yourself a little bit more so that you have less normal force and more parallel force heading down. That's probably an ambiguous answer.

• 52:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But there's also, Chuck, if you plow through snow going forward, if you have more momentum from your heavier body, you'll go through that with it. Because in rowing, if you're gonna, Chuck, if you're gonna bet on what boat is gonna win, and you have no other information, bet on the heaviest boat. Because the heaviest boat, between strokes, the boat slows down because of friction with the water. But if a heavier boat, it will slow down less.

• 52:52Charles Liu?

  Right. And so... No, Neil is exactly right. If you treat the snow as a viscous medium that's providing resistance to your motion, you would want more mass. But mostly, most of the time, ski slopes are groomed, and so there isn't a lot of loose snow blocking you. So instead, you're just worried about the friction.

• 53:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so it's not an obvious, clean answer there.

• 53:11Charles Liu?

  That's right.

• 53:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And just to make it clear, fat people and skinny people will fall at the same rate in free fall. Okay, so it's not like you're fat, you'll fall faster than if you're skinny. Okay?

• 53:25Chuck Nice?

  That's why I'm on the Galileo diet. It don't make a difference what I eat when I fall, I'm still gonna...

• 53:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because he did the experiment with the leaning tower.

• 53:37Charles Liu?

  Just don't jump off the leaning tower.

• 53:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Drop something else off the leaning tower. All right, guys, we gotta call it quits here. We should do this again. This was fun, and people are totally in it from our fanbase. Charles Lu, always great to have you.

• 53:52Charles Liu?

  Thank you so much for having me. It was such a pleasure. It's great to see you guys.

• 53:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we love your COVID rockstar hair.

• 53:58Charles Liu?

  Thank you. Hey, next time, maybe we'll have even more of it to discuss.

• 54:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but then we gotta start a band or something. Gary, always good. And you're a good sport when I make fun of your vintage...

• 54:10Gary O'Reilly?

  Hey, look, it is what it is, dude. We're gonna carbon date me as soon as these mics go off.

• 54:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We'll do that. We'll report that on the next episode. But Chuck Nice, always good to have you.

• 54:18Gary O'Reilly?

  Always a pleasure.

• 54:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Neil deGrasse Tyson, as always, bidding you to keep looking up.