Game-Changing Physics

How do you change the game? Neil deGrasse Tyson, co-hosts Gary O’Reilly and Chuck Nice, and astrophysicist Charles Liu investigate game-changing techniques used to re-shape sports in the first episode of our mini-series.

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. This is StarTalk Sports Edition and we've got a really juicy topic today. We're talking about game changers in their athletic events by having introduced a technique that was without precedent, thereby changing the game. So I've got with me, as usual, my co-host Chuck Nice. What's up Neil? Alright, good. And you're here for levity because you've never done any professional sports. I've never done anything professionally. Any sports at all?

• 0:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Period. So just so there's, just to manage expectations of the audience. And we've got Gary O'Reilly, of course. Gary, we love you, man.

• 0:55Gary O'Reilly?

  Love you too Neil.

• 0:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, alright. We stole you from the UK where you were a soccer pro and a soccer announcer and now you're helping us here with StarTalk.

• 1:05Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, and when I played professional soccer, I did on occasion make people laugh, but that's another story.

• 1:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For a reason. And a whole other, a whole other cause of humor than anything Chuck Nice would be giving us. So here's what we're gonna do. This is the first in a sort of a mini-series, a sort of a subset of StarTalk Sports Edition where we're gonna include a salute to science and technology, okay? And it's how these things have come to bear on sports that were long traditional but then were transformed simply in the presence of clever technique, clever technologies,

• 1:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  and innovative science. And for this particular show, we've got my friend and longtime colleague, Charles Liu. Charles! Hi Neil, good to see you. And people who know you from this show, you're our resident, how do we call it? Geek in chief. His geek in chief. You're our geek in chief because on the geek spectrum, you know, I fancy myself on the geek spectrum, okay? I'm there and I'm, I'm, I'm, but what we know about- You're in the visible light part of this, Neil.

• 2:27Chuck Nice?

  You're in the visible light part.

• 2:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because, because the interesting thing about geekdom is no matter how geeky you think you are, the scale just keeps going beyond. And you'll come up with something that you're proud of and someone just walks in, knocks on the door and say, nope, you missed out episode seven in the third comic book of the second. And it's like, dang. And all I can do is stand in awe, as we all do for you.

• 2:55Charles Liu?

  By the way, that's also true for opera, just so you know.

• 2:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is that right?

• 2:59Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. You just, you just proved our point, Charles.

• 3:04Chuck Nice?

  You can't help yourself. You just proved the whole point.

• 3:07Charles Liu?

  Opera buffs are amazing. You can pull out like one Italian phrase in some opera written in 1864 by somebody that you've never heard of, and you just thought you were really good at it and you're just not.

• 3:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're just not because somebody else just, just throws down on top of that.

• 3:22Chuck Nice?

  See, we just, we just found out like on the spectrum, Charles is gamma ray.

• 3:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gamma ray.

• 3:28Chuck Nice?

  That's what Charles is on the spectrum.

• 3:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's as high as energy on the spectrum as you can get.

• 3:34Chuck Nice?

  Oh, Clyde.

• 3:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Charles, you are a, you're my co-author on more than one project. You were around as one of our chief scientists when we built the Rose Center for Earth and Space. You go way back. You're now on, you're on the faculty. Are you now dean or something? You've got some highfalutin academic title at the.

• 3:58Charles Liu?

  Just a professor, just a professor.

• 4:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, you're just a plain old professor, okay? And you, physics and in the department of physics there?

• 4:07Charles Liu?

  Physics and astronomy.

• 4:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Physics and astronomy at the College of Staten Island of the City University of New York. And that's in arms' reach of us, which wouldn't be necessary in COVID times, but when you have, we have you in studio, that helps because we call on you often. So what we want to do, we want to introduce, I'm going to go in sequence here. We have several athletes that we're profiling in a good way. Charles, Charles overreacts anytime something like that. Do I say, we're profiling Simone Biles? And you say, why are you always?

• 4:36Chuck Nice?

  I was going to say, I'm, I'm, I was about to react. I'm like. I'm not a big fan of profiling, that's all I'm saying.

• 4:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's all I'm saying too. Okay, so she's the reigning and undisputed queen of world gymnastics, okay? And she has more world championship medals than any other gymnast. And so here's what she did. She raised the bar on difficulty and technique while basically gracefully demonstrating how physics can be exploited to annihilate your opponents, okay? Physics, don't argue with physics, because physics is gonna show up. It's either gonna help you or knock you out of competition. So why don't we start out?

• 5:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I have a clip of her in the 2019 US gymnastics championships, where she made history by being the first woman to land a triple double in her floor routine. Let's hear this commentary from, was this NBC? NBC sports announcers, giving commentary on what they witnessed. Let's check this out.

• 5:48Speaker 04

  It is unreal and as well done as anybody, man or woman, has competed in.

• 5:56Speaker 05

  And here we go, right off the bat, the very first tumbling pass.

• 6:02Speaker 05

  Triple twisting, double back.

• 6:12Speaker 04

  Oh!

• 6:15Speaker 04

  Money! Just keep making history, Simone Biles.

• 6:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, so, first, Charles, how does a human body do this? What's going on here? And could it be? That she's four feet eight. I mean, I don't remember many six feet gymnasts of any gender. So what's going on here?

• 6:41Charles Liu?

  Well, as always, it's gravity and rotation that makes the difference. Gravity restricts the amount of time Simone has in the air to perform the stunts and the techniques.

• 6:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But that's true for everybody, so don't be telling me that it's helping her in some way.

• 6:58Charles Liu?

  Well, if she can push harder and get higher, then she can have longer to do her work.

• 7:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hang time.

• 7:06Charles Liu?

  That's the hang time.

• 7:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hang time, gymnastic hang time.

• 7:09Charles Liu?

  Right, rotation is the other aspect. She's doing both a twist and she's doing a roll or flip. Right, so she has to be able to torque her body in two different axes at the same time. Triple twisting, double flip, right? It is truly an amazing combination.

• 7:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, let's just unpack this. So in physics, you learn about rotation, right? So a wheel turns and there's one axis and the equation's related to that. But she's not turning on just one axis here.

• 7:38Charles Liu?

  That's right. So she has to minimize her rotational inertia, or moment of inertia, as it's sometimes called, in two axes at once. And we have a hard time thinking about that, but we'll get to figure skating later, I think. But if you watch a figure skater start a spin, they'll start with their arms out. And then as they pull their arms in closer and closer to the centers of their bodies, their spinning goes faster and faster and faster. That has to do with the conservation of angular momentum, just as you described. In order for Simone to be able to twist three times and flip twice while in the air, her axes have to be super tight in both directions.

• 8:20Charles Liu?

  And this is, for example, why a six-foot gymnast doesn't do as well as a four-foot-eight gymnast. Because if you're big, it's really hard to compact yourself in every dimension that you can in order to do the rotation.

• 8:30Chuck Nice?

  I don't know. I don't think I've ever seen Shaquille O'Neal do a floor routine.

• 8:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That would be amazing. Yeah, so Shaquille O'Neal accepted here, just in this example.

• 8:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do we really wanna see Shaq do a floor routine? No, no. Really? I was just, I closed my eyes and I said, "No, no, no." Exactly.

• 8:56Charles Liu?

  I think at the end, it wouldn't be a floor, right?

• 8:58Chuck Nice?

  That's what I was gonna say, the first thing is...

• 9:00Charles Liu?

  It'd be a series of...

• 9:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. First thing he'd do is a series of craters where...

• 9:03Charles Liu?

  Crater routine, there you go.

• 9:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The crater routine. So, so Charles, so for an ice skater, because the friction is so low between them and the... they and the ice, as, as they're spinning, they can spin faster. And obviously, if you're in midair, there's no friction, not to speak of, between you and the air. So you get to spin faster in the same way that figure skaters do. Whereas, if I'm just standing on the ground and I pull my arms in, I don't end up spinning faster, cuz the friction stops me.

• 9:31Charles Liu?

  You do, actually, Neil.

• 9:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't feel it.

• 9:33Charles Liu?

  We should get... Shaquille and Neil could do that. Ask Shaquille sometime.

• 9:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, I'm saying if I'm standing on the ground.

• 9:39Charles Liu?

  Sometime ask Shaquille, okay, maybe, maybe on his tippy toes, to swing around with his arms open.

• 9:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, ballet style, okay.

• 9:46Charles Liu?

  Yeah, and pull the arms in, and you will spin faster.

• 9:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, okay.

• 9:49Charles Liu?

  You'll stop really quickly because of the friction, but you still will go faster for a short period of time.

• 9:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so Simone Biles has to do this in two axes?

• 9:57Charles Liu?

  So, so the twisting and the...

• 9:59Chuck Nice?

  So do, do you want those axes to come together, like, so that... What are they called, like those, oh man, like a gyroscope? What, what, what are those things called? They're...

• 10:10Charles Liu?

  Right. Well, gyroscope is a, a gyroscopic effect, as you've described, very, very fast. So this is not exactly what we're talking about, but the spinning is still the same, right? The concept is the same. If you're spinning along one axis and you're spinning along another axis... Ideally, right, the axis of rotations, if they intersect, right? You want that to be the same spot, whichever direction you're going, to minimize the amount of torque you need to go in either direction. Yeah.

• 10:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whoa. So, so what you're saying is, if you're, if you manage to spin in two axes, but they... but those two axes will intersect only in one spot? So what's wrong with that? There's, there's... Of course, to say they intersect in the same spot, if they intersect, they intersect. That is the spot. So what are you saying?

• 10:58Charles Liu?

  Right, so what I'm saying is, let's say you, uh...

• 11:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, by the way, when Charles says that's a good point, that means he, he says he was wrong. Okay?

• 11:08Charles Liu?

  Thanks Neil.

• 11:11Charles Liu?

  You're assuming that the axes are in the same plane.

• 11:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 11:14Charles Liu?

  When you have two lines in the same plane, they must intersect at a single point in your geometry. But I'm thinking in three dimensions, which means that you might be offset.

• 11:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, my bad.

• 11:23Charles Liu?

  You have to do this and do that.

• 11:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I just got out geeked there. Right, so if it's two different planes.

• 11:27Charles Liu?

  Does that mean that you're admitting that you're wrong?

• 11:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, I'm admitting that I'm wrong. Not only being wrong, but being wrong saying you're wrong.

• 11:34Chuck Nice?

  Don't mess with those gamma ray geeks. Don't mess with those gamma ray geeks.

• 11:41Gary O'Reilly?

  So Charles, where is she getting all of this energy to perform this and get her hang time? Because when she does her flicks, she doesn't seem to have her hands in contact with the floor for any length of time. And it's not as if she's taking a hundred yard run up to get the speed up.

• 11:58Charles Liu?

  She does take a run up to get to the corner. Right, it's only like, you know, one, half the diagonal length of the floor. But in addition, the spring action that she gets off the ground has to come from her muscle power. Mostly from her lower body, but even from her upper body, she can produce a little bit by swinging her arms or otherwise lifting the upper carriage of her body. And that vertical push is so important. If you get your body up two feet off the ground, to go from up and back down again, you have about seven tenths of a second here on Earth's surface. If you can get four feet off the ground, you have a full second.

• 12:41Charles Liu?

  And if you get six feet off the ground, you have 1.2 seconds, give or take.

• 12:46Chuck Nice?

  If I can get my body six feet off the ground, I am using a ladder.

• 12:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's a crane, there's a crane and a grapple hook.

• 12:57Charles Liu?

  I'm gonna walk to the edge of a six foot high ledge. That's how I get about 2.6 feet off the ground. There's no vertical way for me to do it. But if you look at her video of how high she gets with that spring, she looks like she gets at least four feet off the ground. I wouldn't be surprised if it were closer to six feet. And you can time the time that she leaves the floor to the time she hits the floor again.

• 13:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, you know she's four feet eight.

• 13:23Charles Liu?

  Long, long time.

• 13:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know she's four feet eight, so it looks like she leaps higher than, not to the bottom of her feet, but when she's tumbling forward, it looks like she's easily arcing higher than her own height.

• 13:34Charles Liu?

  Yeah.

• 13:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what it looks like to me.

• 13:35Charles Liu?

  That's right. And so every fraction of a second gives her that much more time to complete a twist or a flip. So it's a tremendous physical activity.

• 13:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it might mean that the future of floor exercises in competitors is to continue to improve that hang time. It just gives you more time to do things to get points for it.

• 13:59Charles Liu?

  That's right. What is the acceleration you can get off the ground before you perform your mid-air activities? Smaller gymnasts have that advantage, but the smaller you are, possibly the less muscle mass you have, and thus the less power you can generate when you leap. And so it's a trade-off, and technique is so important in this case, I'm sure, because of the balance of those two competing characteristics.

• 14:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, I've got one more, I've got another clip here, speaking of technique. There's the one and only Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, right? And I'd sat down with him a couple of years ago, and we chatted about what became the most lethal basketball shot in the NBA. And by the way, of course, he was six-time NBA champion, six-time MVP, but he hasn't played for like 32 years, but his point total, career point total, is still unsurpassed after 32 years, a third of a century, people. So, and some people remember him as starring opposite Bruce Lee in the movie.

• 15:05Charles Liu?

  Game of Death.

• 15:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Game of Death, my favorite moment is when.

• 15:08Charles Liu?

  Charles knows this.

• 15:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Told you. So my favorite moment is when he kicks Bruce Lee in the chest, and Bruce, because Bruce Lee is a tiny man, and Bruce Lee looks, and there's a huge footprint on the chest.

• 15:19Charles Liu?

  A footprint on the chest, absolutely. And of course, he was wearing that bright neon jumpsuit at that time.

• 15:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so it was totally, it was all there. So the question in my conversation with him was, what does he even understand of his own about the skyhook that he pioneered? Check it out. What percent of your 38,000 points were skyhook points? Would you guess?

• 15:41Speaker 06

  I'd say three quarters.

• 15:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Three quarters?

• 15:43Speaker 06

  Yeah. But you know, I learned, everything I learned, you know, had to do with learning the mechanics of the shot and shooting a bow and arrow.

• 15:56Speaker 06

  Because you figure out what the drop is all about, you know, what the arc is all about. And once you got that figured out, you can, you become accurate. You're a marksman at that point.

• 16:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you're a basketball marksman?

• 16:11Speaker 06

  You have to be. Well, if you're gonna be successful.

• 16:15Speaker 06

  And I led the league in field goal percentage a number of years. I think that was really my success too. You know, I had a successful shot that they couldn't block. That's what enabled me to endure.

• 16:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's intriguing about this hook shot, I think Bill Bradley famously was quoted saying that in the hook shot, because he also did the hook shot, the hook shot, your eyes are not on the ball or on your hand or anywhere near your arm. So that there's a sense of where the basket is relative to the ball if you have enough experience on the court. So you don't actually need to look at where the basket is. And you must agree with that because you were successful in the hook shot.

• 16:57Speaker 06

  You don't have to know where the ball is. You gotta keep your eye on the basket, but you don't have to have your eye on the ball.

• 17:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, but that requires some musculoskeletal activity.

• 17:08Speaker 06

  Yes. That's why you practice.

• 17:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the quote of the interview.

• 17:18Charles Liu?

  Musculoskeletal talking.

• 17:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I just like it's, you know, the person scores 32,000 points. Yeah, just keep your eye on the basket and the ball finds the ball. He's casually talking about this. And this is extreme high precision accuracy of that shot and is talent. So Charles, we didn't mention the fact that he happens to be seven feet two. Yeah. So how good is he on an uneven parallel bar?

• 17:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, you can't shake the image of Shaq out on the... I just wanna see a basketball player do gymnastics now.

• 17:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Charles, he's almost shooting down at the basket.

• 17:58Charles Liu?

  That's right. Well, part of the reason the skyhook was so devastating was that if he lifts his arms up and jumps vertically, the ball at the top of the arc is above the level of the rim. And so he's able to drop the ball in such a way that the cross section that the ball has on the way down is maximized. And nobody can defend against him because according to the rules.

• 18:24Chuck Nice?

  You can't block the ball on the way down.

• 18:26Charles Liu?

  Block ball if it's on the way down.

• 18:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh my gosh, that's right, because then it's, it's, it's, what's it called if you do that? It's a, it's, it's goaltending, it's goaltending.

• 18:34Charles Liu?

  Right, and it's an automatic basket. So if Kareem is doing the skyhook, unless he misses, nobody can defend him.

• 18:42Chuck Nice?

  That's why it was the only shot in basketball to be determined an indefensible shot. Because the only way you can get to it is to block it while it's basically at his hand, which I think is.

• 18:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's still in his hand.

• 18:56Chuck Nice?

  It's only been done once.

• 18:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, you just have to jump 10 feet up to do that, you know, while he's doing it, that's all.

• 19:03Charles Liu?

  Yeah, now, now, Michael Jordan's fadeaway jumper was also claimed to be indefensible, but for a different reason. He created space while he was shooting. But somebody who was like nine feet tall could theoretically have stopped that shot. But for Kareem, it was literally not allowed.

• 19:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow.

• 19:19Gary O'Reilly?

  So did players stop being seven foot two?

• 19:23Charles Liu?

  No, he feels taller.

• 19:24Gary O'Reilly?

  Right, did the physics change? And why on earth don't we still see the skyhook in the NBA?

• 19:29Chuck Nice?

  Because you now have Steph Curry, who has raised an entire generation of kids who want to shoot the ball from their bedroom.

• 19:42Chuck Nice?

  Because that, that was cool.

• 19:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And get all net along the way.

• 19:48Charles Liu?

  Rule changes, rule changes and style changes are the only reason I think that it's not fashionable anymore. Aside from the fact that Kareem was, as you described Neil, a remarkable human in terms of muscle skeletal things going on, right?

• 20:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 20:04Charles Liu?

  I don't know if anybody has that sign of hand-eye coordination where you don't even have to look at the ball to drop it into the hoop from a distance. The three-point shot now is statistically more devastating than any two-point shooting, unfortunately.

• 20:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you're good at it.

• 20:20Charles Liu?

  Also, right.

• 20:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You left that out. If you're good at the three points.

• 20:23Chuck Nice?

  And the thing is though, three, I forget who said this, three always beats two.

• 20:31Charles Liu?

  Three is greater than two.

• 20:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Three is greater than two. Three is great. Thank you Chuck for that little bit of arithmetic for this. Guys, we've got to take a quick break. We've got to take a quick break. When we come back, more in our exploration of athletic greatness as measured by who has changed the game just by their very existence when we return.

• 21:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back, StarTalk Sports Edition. I've got with me our resident geek in chief, and you know who that is. Me.

• 21:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Then you woke up and that was.

• 21:25Charles Liu?

  I give you, I give you the crown, Gary, go for it.

• 21:27Gary O'Reilly?

  It's not to be taken from you, sir.

• 21:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And of course, we've got Gary and Chuck. We're talking about athletic greatness that manifests not simply by how hard they work, but what technique they might have perfected. And we can't have a show like this without talking about the 1968 Mexico City Olympics. A lot of interesting things happened there, not the least of which was Bob Beaman breaking the long jump world record by more than a foot. By more than a foot.

• 21:56Chuck Nice?

  They tested for steroids, because that's a lot.

• 22:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So more than a foot and it was he didn't just lightly beat his own record. He smashed his own record and every other jump that had ever made. So interesting things happened in those Olympics and I remember that I was old enough to to to remember them. Uh, Mexico City, it was it was at high altitude and all of this. But for the purposes of this show, we're going to talk about Dick Fosbury. He's a high jumper and he won the gold medal going backwards over the bar. When everyone before him had gone forwards over the bar. And it's looks like he just flops backwards into the into the cushion. And it became known as the Fosbury flop.

• 22:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So we've got this clip of an announcer sort of introducing the viewer to Dick Fosbury's innovative technique. And it's got this very period flavor to it. Check it out.

• 23:02Speaker 07

  An amazing and amusing champion is Dick Fosbury. Here seen psyching himself to a winning pitch.

• 23:13Speaker 07

  And another gold medal. What's that again, Dick? Unorthodox perhaps, but kids all over the world are sure to be trying the famous Fosbury flop.

• 23:26Chuck Nice?

  God, I love you just it's it's just amazing how those how you can tell this is what you had to sound like in order to be an announcer back then.

• 23:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was you needed that announcer voice?

• 23:37Charles Liu?

  Well, Gary, Gary, did people sound like? Did people sound like that in UK sports broadcasting too back in the 60s?

• 23:45Gary O'Reilly?

  Um, language is the same, the accent slightly different. So it was it it was very formulaic. We've copied.

• 23:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Charles, tell me, why, uh, why does this work? And why does everyone do it now?

• 23:59Charles Liu?

  Well, two key things. People used to go forward or backward over the bar, right? If you jump backwards or sideways, it was a scissors kick technique. Where you actually could get slightly higher kickoff, some felt going backwards or sideways than going forward. But what Fosbury did was go over backwards, but bent.

• 24:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 24:25Charles Liu?

  He never needed to bring his entire center of mass over the bar. All he was, had to do was to make sure that every part of his body was over the bar for at least a brief moment. And so he could fluidly go over backwards. And because the, the legs could hang down low, he didn't have to produce as much upward power. And then he could land with a flop on his back and his head.

• 24:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what you're saying is, if you go over backwards, your legs dangle at your knees. That creates a part of an arc. And any good athlete is flexible bending backwards, right? And so you, he makes it like a, a, a semi circle out of his body going backwards and then curls over the bar.

• 25:09Charles Liu?

  That's right.

• 25:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But, but you're, what you're telling me, all of us, is that he took his center of mass outside of his body.

• 25:15Charles Liu?

  Basically right. Think of a U shape, right? If you have, if you have a bar and it's straight, the center of mass is in the middle. But if you make a U shape, the center of mass is kind of down in the middle of the U. So if you're going over and the whole time, compared to the bar, you're a U shape. Then your center of mass rides below the bar at all times.

• 25:38Chuck Nice?

  You know, the funny thing is, you would think this would be intuitive. Because he's really just following the natural curve of the human body. From our spine all the way down to our ankles, our body curves that way. But if you were to go forward, at some point, the curve stops at your thigh. Cause your knees don't bend.

• 26:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They don't bend the other way.

• 26:07Chuck Nice?

  So you would think somebody would have thought of this before him.

• 26:12Gary O'Reilly?

  Do you know what Chuck? If you introduce thicker matting into the equation, which it came around, around about that sort of time, you can exercise that technique. If you've got nothing but sand to jump into over a bar, your landing's quite brutal.

• 26:27Charles Liu?

  That's an excellent point. The technology or the rule change that allowed a mattress, right Gary? I mean, before this, the people landed on a sort of a, like you said, a sand pit or a thin mattress or something. But once they created those really springy thick things, you didn't mind hitting the back of your head every time you landed. And so maybe people thought of it before, but then said, I actually want to keep.

• 26:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I ain't going there, yeah.

• 26:51Chuck Nice?

  So the guy who actually thought of it got brain damage.

• 26:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thought of it and did it.

• 26:58Chuck Nice?

  Right. He did it, got four concussions, forgot who he was, and the technique was temporarily lost.

• 27:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, so Charles, the world record now for men's, Sotomayor from Cuba?

• 27:12Charles Liu?

  Yeah.

• 27:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, it's eight feet and a quarter inch. That is huge. And the women's record, Costa de Nova from Bulgaria, six feet, ten and a quarter inches. This is, I can't even imagine this, but let me ask you, is there, of course, they're all doing the Fosbury Flop, is there some bit of physics that we're waiting to be invented to make a brilliant leap in these numbers? Jetpack.

• 27:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Was the Fosbury Flop the physics limit of this event?

• 27:44Charles Liu?

  Well, I imagine that there could be technique further developed in the future that allows you to go higher without producing more power.

• 27:58Charles Liu?

  And that might require a human being adapting, training in a different way, different muscles, something like that.

• 28:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so a different, a leaping technique.

• 28:07Charles Liu?

  Right.

• 28:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 28:08Charles Liu?

  And every time, every time people say, oh, we've reached the limit, you can't do any better, somebody eventually breaks that limit. So I, it would be foolish for me to speculate whether we've reached the top.

• 28:18Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay, let's, let's, let's join two of our game changers together here. What if I got myself that six foot gymnast and made them do a floor routine run up and get them up and over the bar?

• 28:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, interesting.

• 28:31Charles Liu?

  That would be amazing. Then the landing would have to be really far, right? And then do that huge jump. I think that would be a really interesting thing to try.

• 28:40Gary O'Reilly?

  Probably be against the laws of the event, but I'm, I'm interested to see if that experiment works.

• 28:46Charles Liu?

  Rule changes would make a great point, Gary. Just like the three point play, put the skyhook into the back burner of basketball.

• 28:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hmm hmm, hmm hmm, hmm hmm.

• 28:55Gary O'Reilly?

  Interesting.

• 28:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So let's move on to our next example here. It's Edwin Moses, keeping in the track and field theme, a double Olympic gold medalist. Uh, and he had a winning record of nine years, nine months and nine days.

• 29:10Charles Liu?

  Wow.

• 29:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Who, who even calculates that? And his event was the 400 meter hurdles. But that's not even what I like most about him. He was a physics and engineering major at Morehouse College. Yes.

• 29:22Charles Liu?

  Oh, yeah.

• 29:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Geek in the house. All right. And so I interviewed him recently for an earlier version of StarTalk Sports Edition, but now there's a clip that has special relevance for this show. So check it out.

• 29:39Speaker 08

  All I had to do was teach myself how to run the hurdles 35 meters apart. And the first time I did it, I found myself running 13. I found myself using my left leg, which is the inner leg, which

• 29:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  13 strides between

• 29:52Speaker 08

  13 steps, yeah. Yeah. Running closer to the curve. And then I figured out that if I run eight inches away from the inner line, which is where they measure the lane, versus, uh, you know, two or three feet in the middle of the lane, I'm saving three to four meters per race, which is like 15 feet, anywhere from 12 to 15 feet. So that was the first adjustment I made.

• 30:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, Edwin, are you saying

• 30:15Charles Liu?

  Wow.

• 30:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  that the effective length Of your path because you start out in blocks, right?

• 30:23Speaker 08

  Right.

• 30:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And of course you have to stay in your lane because it's your hurdle all the way around. So the length, the actual 400 meters is not the center line of the width of your lane?

• 30:34Speaker 08

  Eight inches, eight inches from the inner line.

• 30:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I didn't know that.

• 30:38Speaker 08

  Eight inches from the inner line. So my endeavor was to run as close to the inner line as I could. Whereas most people just run all over the lane. And by doing that, I calculated the radius of the track and figured it out that I was saving three to four meters per race. So that's 1250 feet. And I was, I was basically.

• 30:56Chuck Nice?

  And that, that, that can, that's unfair advantage. That's a huge, that's a huge distance. Wow. I, I just love the fact that Edwin Moses ran all those races with a ruler strapped to his foot.

• 31:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  With a laser altimeter.

• 31:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Charles, talk me through this. So is it really that? I mean, I have to believe he did the calculation right, but, but can I get a backup verification of that from you?

• 31:28Charles Liu?

  Let's do some real time math, shall we? If we approximate the oval track as a circle and the 400 meters is all the way around.

• 31:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 31:38Charles Liu?

  The circumference of anything is two pi R, where R is the radius. So you're going around the whole track once, two pi R. Now if R happens to be, say, three feet less or two feet less, in this case, it's like one and a half feet less, right? So it's two times pi times one and a half feet, one and a half, two pi is six. Right? So one and a half times six something is about nine or 10 feet. He got it bang on.

• 32:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what we're saying is he ran a shorter race.

• 32:09Charles Liu?

  Right. He did. That's it. I mean, think about it. 10 feet is considered a massive advantage.

• 32:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. So if he doesn't tell anyone this and everyone's saying, oh my gosh, look at this amazing athlete. He's just smarter than everybody else.

• 32:23Charles Liu?

  Well, yeah, I mean, all track people do know that in the end you want to get on the inside. Right? That, that people know, but the question is exactly how much Edwin was able to do the math. Quite literally.

• 32:39Chuck Nice?

  And then, and, and so this for all of you kids listening, and you're like doing math and going, when am I ever going to use this crap?

• 32:48Charles Liu?

  When you win a gold medal. That's right, that's right. When you're undefeated for nine years, nine months and nine days. But another thing that you should note in here is what he said, the 13 steps. In his day, very few people could even do 13. Most people struggled at 15. And the more you touch the ground, the more you slow down, right? If you stay in the air more, so if you only touch the ground 13 times between hurdles, you have a distinct advantage over people who are 15 times touching the ground.

• 33:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is this, is this true, Charles, for the, for the embarrassingly obvious fact that whenever you're touching the ground, you're not moving forward?

• 33:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I mean, if your foot is in contact with the track, your foot is not moving forward.

• 33:36Charles Liu?

  Correct. Your center of mass continues to move, but you will be moving a smaller distance if a piece of you is touching the ground just because of the friction. You're also, you're adding the vertical and the horizontal push, the force, every time you touch the ground, so.

• 33:52Chuck Nice?

  That's how cheetahs run.

• 33:54Charles Liu?

  Yeah, you could conceivably run with more power with each step. But Chuck, you're right. Cheetahs like take a step and they're like gliding through the air for a period of time.

• 34:05Chuck Nice?

  And they purposely elongate their body while they're in the air.

• 34:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the air.

• 34:10Chuck Nice?

  To cover more distance and so that they're touching the ground, much less.

• 34:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, you're saying the cheetah did the math, is what you're saying.

• 34:20Charles Liu?

  Soccer players too, right, Gary? Soccer players do that, right? If you want to do a truly high-speed run, you are trying to take as few strides as possible and make them long, right?

• 34:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but that's, but if you have the ball, you need to still control the ball and then that's the opposite.

• 34:33Gary O'Reilly?

  That's the alchemy, to be able to run with the ball as quick as you can run without it.

• 34:38Chuck Nice?

  That's why they say Messi is, Messi is so great. Yep. Because he doesn't have those long strides, but he's so fast with the dribble.

• 34:47Gary O'Reilly?

  Mm-hmm, yep.

• 34:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Charles, in the modern-day tracks, they use the tartan sort of rubber.

• 34:53Charles Liu?

  Yeah.

• 34:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Track that has a sort of a springiness to it. Tell me briefly about that, briefly, because we've got some more we want to cover here.

• 35:00Charles Liu?

  Well, the elasticity of that stuff is certainly very nice and being able to provide a little extra spring in your step every time you step down. But really, that elastic stuff is to protect your ankles.

• 35:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 35:12Charles Liu?

  More important than anything else, you want to keep the runners running for a longer period of time in their lives. So they're like shock absorbers. So in a sense, you get an advantage, but everyone gets the same advantage because they're all running on the same track. But maybe you get an extra year or two in your career without pounding it hard on.

• 35:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, wait. So that's first. Wait, wait. But a shock absorber absorbs shocks. If your energy that you use to squeeze it returns to you with the material recovering its shape, then it's a shock helper, in a sense.

• 35:44Charles Liu?

  Right. And what it does is the parts of your body that need to compress, like your ankles, okay, will compress and be able to come back out. You're reducing, you're reducing the impulse that your ankles are feeling because the amount of time of impact is increased by that.

• 36:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is increased.

• 36:02Charles Liu?

  To squish.

• 36:03Gary O'Reilly?

  Do you know the other aspect to the vulcanized rubber, the mondo track that they run on?

• 36:07Charles Liu?

  Hmm.

• 36:08Gary O'Reilly?

  You use shorter spikes. If they ran on cinders, the spikes had to be longer because they wanted grip. The grip means friction. The shorter spikes.

• 36:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 36:17Gary O'Reilly?

  Don't have as much friction. And Moses said, as soon as he ran in the first, his first Olympics, and he realized he was going to run on this rubberized track, he went game over.

• 36:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow.

• 36:28Gary O'Reilly?

  Everyone else is running for second place.

• 36:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, because my father, when he ran track, when I was a little kid and he still ran, I saw his cleats and, and the spikes. And when the tartan tracks came in and other tracks of that nature, he was able to use the shorter spike.

• 36:44Charles Liu?

  Yeah.

• 36:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And yeah, the less time you've dug into the track, to your point, Charles, you want to minimize how much time you're doing that.

• 36:50Charles Liu?

  Wow.

• 36:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hmm. Guys, we got another clip, but we, we ran out of time in this segment. Let's get to it in our shoot the shit segment. And we're going to talk about Sasha Cohen, the figure skater who did a quad jump.

• 37:04Charles Liu?

  Oh.

• 37:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But like how, when and where. We're going to get to that right when we come back on StarTalk Sports Edition.

• 37:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back, StarTalk Sports Edition, third segment, the final segment. Usually, we just shoot the shit here, but there was so much content, some of it spilled into this segment, and let's get straight to it. We're gonna talk about the figure skater Sasha Cohen, who's actually a friend of StarTalk. She appeared in one of our live performances at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and it was great to have her onstage, and she still has bubbly energy, and it was great just talking to her about her career and what she's doing now. But let's pick up a segment from that conversation where we talk about how you break down the components of the quad jump. Let's check it out.

• 38:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You gave a brilliant description of how you give yourself rotational inertia, okay?

• 38:21Speaker 09

  For a jump. We haven't even gotten to the spin.

• 38:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But however, you didn't... Well, okay, so to me, in physics, you generally break things apart into components, and you put them all together for the one thing. I break this apart. You told me how you gain spin, but if you're gonna do a quad, you have to be airborne long enough to complete the quad before you hit the ground.

• 38:44Speaker 09

  Yes.

• 38:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So...

• 38:45Speaker 09

  That's part of it, because you'll notice, if you've watched figure skating this past Olympics, you will see some people barely get off the ice, and they can do three turns, and some people get this high up, and they don't complete it.

• 38:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Two or three feet off the ice. So it really is the rotational spin.

• 39:01Speaker 09

  It's how fast you launch yourself up.

• 39:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gotcha.

• 39:04Speaker 09

  And then, obviously, it goes into like, what's your body type? Do you have like wide hips? How fast are you spinning? And that's why men rotate faster and generally do a lot more quads than women do. They spin faster, they've got narrower hips, but you know, women are more flexible, so we've got better spiral sequences.

• 39:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How many women have done quads?

• 39:24Speaker 09

  You know, a couple have done it in practice, and I feel like maybe like one or two have done it in competition.

• 39:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you've done a quad?

• 39:31Speaker 09

  I have. A long time ago, a long time ago. You can... It's... Thankfully, YouTube exists, and it will always live there. I hope. I'll be like, wow, I used to do that. Now I just sit.

• 39:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's such great memories being on stage with her. So, so Charles, so she said a lot of what you said earlier in this show, where you need the height, so the hang time to borrow from basketball. And but she's also talking about the diameter, the hip diameter of men versus women. Why should that matter here?

• 40:07Charles Liu?

  Right. Well, the wider you are compared to how tall you are, the greater your so-called moment of inertia is, and the more force you need in order to get yourself spinning. So, a man's ratio of the width of the hip bones, the pelvis, to height is smaller than a woman's.

• 40:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On average, yeah.

• 40:29Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I was gonna say, cuz that, that you, you just described the antithesis to my body type.

• 40:37Chuck Nice?

  Because I'm, I'm very hippie, but my hips don't lie, so I don't.

• 40:45Charles Liu?

  So, so the.

• 40:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I see what you did there, Chuck.

• 40:48Charles Liu?

  So, the, the speed that she was talking about, right, is very true. Because in figure skating, you can start your spin while you're still on the ice. So you can create more torque. So if you're speeding along and being able to translate more of that translational momentum into annual momentum as you lift off, you don't have to get as high if you're already spinning quickly when you start your jump.

• 41:12Chuck Nice?

  Ah, cool.

• 41:13Gary O'Reilly?

  But this is, this is the really fine line for me. Because if I go too fast, I'm in trouble. Because every jump, and Chuck taught me this, every jump has to land on one foot.

• 41:24Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 41:25Gary O'Reilly?

  One skate.

• 41:25Chuck Nice?

  That, that is, that's a rule, yes.

• 41:27Gary O'Reilly?

  Right. So if I come too quickly, I have less chance of control. And I've really got to get this fine line. And I can imagine it's difficult if you think you're approaching that, that jump too quickly, what you might bail out of it and just do a triple. There might be all sorts of in-event. Just things that you feel, yeah, that you feel in the moment before you can do that, or you just say it's perfect.

• 41:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Charles, what do you say about someone who, let's say you can do it in practice, but in the, in the heat of the moment, you, you, you make mid-course decisions regarding it?

• 42:03Charles Liu?

  Yeah.

• 42:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How, how, how common is that, do you think?

• 42:06Charles Liu?

  It happens. There are athletes who can land quads in practice, but do not land quads in competition. Or others who, for example, have won many, uh, smaller events, uh, world championships even, but in the Olympics have not won.

• 42:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On the biggest stage.

• 42:25Charles Liu?

  Yeah, it's a combination of, of bad luck and some sports psychology, right? There's minute to minute or competition to competition, your body's just a little bit different, the conditions might be a little bit different, and then what your brain does to command your body to perform these physically very difficult acts can vary from one venue to the next.

• 42:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because it's, it's really remarkable, Charles. I, I don't think people pause and reflect on this often or deeply enough. But here I am, training, right? And I'm, I'm doing my best and I go to, in smaller contests, then I go to a big stage, as is so often the case in the Olympics, that's the biggest stage there is, and then you perform better than you ever did.

• 43:11Charles Liu?

  Right.

• 43:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, how does that happen unless your brain took over at some point? Because your, your muscles, your speed, your coordination is performing in a way you have never seen.

• 43:23Chuck Nice?

  It's because you're an attention whore.

• 43:28Charles Liu?

  No, no, no, no, no.

• 43:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you for that analysis, Charles.

• 43:31Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, no, it's just like, look at, look at that, like you have us, it happens.

• 43:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But, but, but all I'm trying to say is that if your body could actually do that reliably, you would be doing it all the time and the Olympics would just be another day in the park. But it's not.

• 43:48Gary O'Reilly?

  So the big, so, okay, Neil, here, from the athletic.

• 43:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For those who do rise to the challenge, you, it's gotta be the brain, not the muscles.

• 43:56Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 43:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's all I'm saying.

• 43:57Gary O'Reilly?

  From my side of it, there are some people, you put them in the big game, their big game player arrives.

• 44:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Like Reggie Jackson being Mr. October.

• 44:07Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, and it's, and I think you're absolutely right when it becomes a mental aspect, because they didn't all of a sudden become the Hulk. This thing happened inside their mind and they just said, right, it's time to deliver. Whatever the best is, it's coming now.

• 44:21Charles Liu?

  Right. Well, we all know that our brains control how much adrenalin goes into our systems and allows our bodies to perform a little bit higher or lower. For some people.

• 44:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, so Charles, she just gave me an idea. So if at the beginning of a sprint race or anything, or at any race at all, you just have a monster chasing people.

• 44:41Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. And as a matter of fact, that's how Usain Bolt wins all his races. Right before they sound the gun, he hears, whoa.

• 44:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's actually, there's a monster in his head chasing him. Right, right.

• 44:57Charles Liu?

  Put, put a, like a cheetah behind everybody in the starting blocks and then go.

• 45:04Chuck Nice?

  That doesn't work because you know the old joke. I don't have to be faster than the cheetah. I just gotta be faster than you.

• 45:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Be faster than you.

• 45:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. So, so, so what we're agreeing upon here is the limits of your body can only actually be achieved in the limits of your mind.

• 45:27Chuck Nice?

  I love that.

• 45:27Charles Liu?

  Well, the two of them are tied.

• 45:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, that's a quote.

• 45:29Chuck Nice?

  I love that. Wow.

• 45:30Charles Liu?

  The two of them are tied closely together. I don't know if it's one way or the other that's more important, but certainly they are, they are not independent.

• 45:36Chuck Nice?

  What you just said.

• 45:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I gotta type that one down.

• 45:38Chuck Nice?

  That's a good one, man.

• 45:39Gary O'Reilly?

  That's a new T-shirt. We gotta get that, getting that on a T-shirt.

• 45:43Chuck Nice?

  I, I heard this, I heard this program I was driving once and I, because I was driving, I don't know the name of the program, but it's, it was talking about exactly what you just said. And there's this bicycle race that lasts for like days and days, like non-stop. You don't get to stop. And this gentleman who participated in the race.

• 46:09Chuck Nice?

  Finished the race basically in a state of unconsciousness because he was pushing himself so hard and his teammates were pushing him and he but basically it was all his brain that was doing everything.

• 46:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so that takes us back to the original marathon.

• 46:28Chuck Nice?

  Well, maybe. What's the original marathon?

• 46:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, as the story goes, you know, the runner who was sent back to Athens from marathon to report on the results of the battle, and he ran the whole way, I'm told in the legend, he delivered the information and then dropped dead.

• 46:44Chuck Nice?

  Oh.

• 46:45Charles Liu?

  Yeah, that's too bad.

• 46:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so why didn't he drop dead one kilometer sooner, right? Right? So.

• 46:51Charles Liu?

  His brain carried him that extra.

• 46:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. The brain carried him over. And isn't it true, Charles, in China, that the death rate of citizens, senior citizens probably, is higher the week after the Chinese New Year than before?

• 47:03Charles Liu?

  Possibly, yes, because.

• 47:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or it could be just they ate too much. They partied down.

• 47:10Charles Liu?

  It's interesting, and I think other holidays, it might be true, like Christmas and New Years in the United States, right? I mean, it you you came up with a great quote right now, but I think Yogi Berra said it just as well, or, you know, when he said that ninety percent of the game.

• 47:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yogi Bear, Yogi Berra, get your yogis straight here.

• 47:28Charles Liu?

  When Yogi Berra.

• 47:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you.

• 47:30Charles Liu?

  What did I say?

• 47:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yogi Bear.

• 47:32Charles Liu?

  Oh, hey boo boo, that's one.

• 47:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, fine.

• 47:37Charles Liu?

  Yogi Berra said.

• 47:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It ain't over till the cover. Boo boo.

• 47:44Charles Liu?

  Yogi Berra said, you should have the picnic basket. Okay, now, Yogi Berra said ninety percent of the game is half mental.

• 47:53Chuck Nice?

  What a great quote. That's amazing.

• 47:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so he flunked his math class.

• 48:00Charles Liu?

  But he's in the Hall of Fame.

• 48:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's in the Hall of Fame.

• 48:03Charles Liu?

  He and Edward Moses have to like duke it out.

• 48:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They gotta figure that one out.

• 48:07Gary O'Reilly?

  Charles, here's a thought for you. Is there any room left for innovation in sports technique? Or are we... Okay, there's my answer.

• 48:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do we have to go straight to machines and human genetic re...

• 48:21Charles Liu?

  I mean, there are two aspects to this, right? One is individual activity. You guys remember the Berkhoff blast off?

• 48:30Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 48:31Charles Liu?

  Yeah, this was a backstroker who figured out that if he did not surface from his first launch till he was more than halfway across the pool.

• 48:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If he stayed a porpoise underwater.

• 48:41Chuck Nice?

  Dolphin kicked his way across half the pool.

• 48:43Charles Liu?

  And he had a devastating advantage for a long time. And the world swimming competition body banned the move.

• 48:50Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 48:51Charles Liu?

  Changed the rules because they felt that it was outside the scope of what the backstroke was supposed to be.

• 48:56Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, you're violating...

• 48:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But did they take away his medal?

• 48:58Charles Liu?

  No, no.

• 48:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When they did that?

• 48:59Charles Liu?

  They did not take away any of his awards.

• 49:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, well, they could have done that with Fosbury.

• 49:03Charles Liu?

  That's right.

• 49:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And they could have said, no, you broke the rule, this mystical rule that we don't even know we've written yet. And but they didn't, they kept it in. So is this just regressively thinking boards of these sports? That won't allow innovation?

• 49:19Charles Liu?

  You can argue that if you're underwater for so long, you're not actually doing a backstroke, right? You're on your back, but you're not actually on the surface of the water.

• 49:28Chuck Nice?

  That's what they said. You're violating the spirit of the stroke itself.

• 49:32Charles Liu?

  It depends on each game and its rules.

• 49:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But he's still on his back. Come on now.

• 49:37Charles Liu?

  It really depends. You're not swinging your arms, though, right?

• 49:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So he's still on his back.

• 49:41Gary O'Reilly?

  Didn't they ban Ryan Lochte as well for his innovation?

• 49:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What did he do?

• 49:47Gary O'Reilly?

  He did, I think he did a similar thing, but he did it in the medley. So he used the similar technique in the medley, and I think that they put the kibosh on that as well.

• 49:56Charles Liu?

  Yeah, it's possible that swimming just has different philosophical philosophy about the rules compared to others, right? And then in team sports, of course, if you assemble a team of people with extra special skills or certain abilities.

• 50:09Gary O'Reilly?

  That's the X-Men.

• 50:10Charles Liu?

  You have an infinite number of different innovations you can do. I think of the West Coast offense in football, for example, that was created by Bill Walsh and San Francisco 49ers with Joe Montana. They basically created the offense that dominates what is in football today. When you had a quarterback that could throw the ball accurately across a wide range and just keep moving and keep moving, keep moving. And the hurry-up offense in football, for example, had to be curtailed a little bit because the offensive team was getting such an advantage by not going to the huddle.

• 50:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what you're saying, Chuck, Charles, is we don't know what hasn't been invented yet that could innovate things that we think have gone stale. Because you need just someone clever to come along and rethink it.

• 50:57Charles Liu?

  That's right. So I think the answer to Gary's question is that innovation will always continue, and it's all a matter of whether sport can keep up.

• 51:05Chuck Nice?

  And there'll always be someone there to say, "No, you can't do that."

• 51:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Guys, we gotta call it quits there, but this has been a very fun conversation. Glad we have those archival clips to add to what we were talking about. And so Chuck, always good to have you tweeting at Chuck Nice Comic. And Gary, my3leftfeet.

• 51:26Gary O'Reilly?

  Yep, that'll be me.

• 51:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's your Twitter handle.

• 51:28Gary O'Reilly?

  Yep.

• 51:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That would be you, okay? And Charles Liu, our resident geek-in-chief, you have never failed to impress us with everything you bring to the table.

• 51:37Charles Liu?

  Thank you.

• 51:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that's why we keep you in arms' reach.

• 51:39Charles Liu?

  Thank you so much.

• 51:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For just us.

• 51:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, and you had a book coming out, right? The, what was that? The, uh, the answers in the-

• 51:48Charles Liu?

  30 Second Space Travel is coming out.

• 51:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 51:51Charles Liu?

  And, uh, there's a children's, a baby's book about Newton's laws of physics.

• 51:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, excuse me. Okay.

• 52:00Chuck Nice?

  For ba- babies for babies. Those are some smart babies.

• 52:04Charles Liu?

  Yeah, well, amazing.

• 52:05Chuck Nice?

  What do you do? You just throw it in the crib?

• 52:09Charles Liu?

  And you can measure the parabolic arc of the motion based on Newton's law of gravity.

• 52:13Chuck Nice?

  Nice.

• 52:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. Well, we'll have to talk about that one when that one arrives.

• 52:18Charles Liu?

  Okay.

• 52:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Guys, we call it quits there. Uh, thanks for, for this show. I've been your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. Keep looking up.