Sam I Am
07-16-2012, 01:24 PM
This is all kinds of awesome. It is a new segment created by xkcd.com called What-If. Go check it out with the link below.
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What would happen if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90% the speed of light?
Let’s set aside the question of how we got the baseball moving that fast. We'll suppose it's a normal pitch, except in the instant the pitcher releases the ball, it magically accelerates to 0.9c. From that point onward, everything proceeds according to normal physics.:
http://what-if.xkcd.com/imgs/a/1/01.png
The answer turns out to be “a lot of things”, and they all happen very quickly, and it doesn’t end well for the batter (or the pitcher). I sat down with some physics books, a Nolan Ryan action figure, and a bunch of videotapes of nuclear tests and tried to sort it all out. What follows is my best guess at a nanosecond-by-nanosecond portrait:
Complete Article (http://what-if.xkcd.com/1/)
=====================================
What would happen if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90% the speed of light?
Let’s set aside the question of how we got the baseball moving that fast. We'll suppose it's a normal pitch, except in the instant the pitcher releases the ball, it magically accelerates to 0.9c. From that point onward, everything proceeds according to normal physics.:
http://what-if.xkcd.com/imgs/a/1/01.png
The answer turns out to be “a lot of things”, and they all happen very quickly, and it doesn’t end well for the batter (or the pitcher). I sat down with some physics books, a Nolan Ryan action figure, and a bunch of videotapes of nuclear tests and tried to sort it all out. What follows is my best guess at a nanosecond-by-nanosecond portrait:
Complete Article (http://what-if.xkcd.com/1/)