Baseball is the subject of many artistic creations and scientific studies. Movies such as “Field of Dreams”, “Bull Durham”, and “Moneyball” depict baseball embedded in the larger American culture. Books such as the elegant “Game Time: A Baseball Companion”, by Roger Angell, are a literary pleasure even for someone only peripherally familiar with the game. And baseball has also engendered a broad culture of analysis through applied physics. The pitch is an object of particular fascination for the physics-inclined baseball fan.… Read the rest “fastball: movement and speed – updated”
physics
Your travels are Written in your body
Our bones, teeth and hair carry in them an encrypted GPS log of where we’ve been. If you lived in Seattle through your childhood and moved to Chicago ten years ago, that is indelibly written there. There will also be a record of what you’ve eaten recently. Advances in the science and technology of reading that information are having an impact on forensics, anthropology and agriculture, among other pursuits. At the heart of that technology lies a fundamental property of matter, which is that many of the atoms that make up all of creation come in subtle variations, variations that we are able to detect with great precision.… Read the rest “Your travels are Written in your body”