“Every 3 feet of lead is worth about one-tenth of a second, and a rolling start is worth a good half second. Indeed, the difference between the runner having his weight mainly on his front foot and mainly on his back foot (but don't let the pitcher catch you leaning!) must be worth more than one-tenth of a second.”
“A small, but interesting, portion of baseball can be understood on the basis of physical principles. The flight of balls, the liveliness of balls, the structure of bats, and the character of the colli...”
Robert Adair (physicist)
“Much of the subtlety of baseball is derived from the fact that so much of the game is played in the region between definitely smooth flow and definitely turbulent flow, at ball velocities greater than...”
Robert Adair (physicist)
“The maximum Magnus force on a ball spinning at a rate of 1800 rpm is seen to be about one-third of the weight of the ball, so we cannot expect a ball spinning at that rate to curve more than one third...”
Robert Adair (physicist)
“Note that the ball falls at a rather large angle at the end of its flight; the trajectories are not symmetric.”
Robert Adair (physicist)
“Almost all of fluid dynamics follows from a differential equation called the Navier-Stokes equation. But this general equation has not, in practice, led to solutions of real problems of any complexity...”
Robert Adair (physicist)
