Baseball: Box Seats, and Relativity

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MELISSA BLOCK, host:

Baseball has been on the mind of commentator Aaron Freeman--baseball and something slightly more academic.

AARON FREEMAN:

I wish I could go to Wrigley Field with a bunch of really precise instruments and measure the implications of Einstein's theory of relativity during a Chicago Cubs baseball game. For example, if I sat in a boxed seat along one of the baselines, a ball thrown from the pitcher to the plate would get a teeny bit thinner than a ball at rest. Now with a baseball traveling at only 90 miles an hour, I would have to measure to more decimal places than rapper 50 Cent has bling, but the theory says there would be a difference.

As a baseball--or any object--accelerates through space, it flattens in the direction of the acceleration. The phenomenon is called the Lorenz contraction. There is even a famous Lorenz contraction joke. If you have a four-foot-long ladder and a three-foot-long room, if you run fast enough, the ladder will fit. So the faster the ball is thrown, the flatter it gets, from the point of view of me in my nice baseline boxed seat.

Instead of measuring the speed of a Kerry Wood fastball in miles per hour, I could track his pitches in degrees of Lorenz contraction. And if Kerry was really on the game, a physicist sportscaster might shout, `Wood is really throwing pancakes today.' Einstein's theory of special relativity says measurements of time would be an intsy-bintsy(ph) bit different for Cubs pitcher Mark Prior and the baseballs he throws--sometimes at Alex Rodriguez's head.

But I would love to demonstrate with experiments that as an object accelerates toward the speed of light, time for that object stretches out. If one of my twin daughters gets on a spaceship and flies away at nearly the speed of light, for her, a few days might pass, but for her twin back on Earth, weeks, months, years might pass depending on the speed of the spaceship. The effect is, of course, relative to the positions of the observer and the object. Now if I ran alongside a Mark Prior fastball as it streaked toward home plate, time would pass for me and the ball at exactly the same rate. Of course, if I ran into the umpire at 90 miles an hour, that would be a bad thing. Then again, I don't like umpires that much.

Now, again, the effects of relativity at baseball speeds are incredibly small, but if I had the right equipment, watch out! But if I were a mathematician enough to calculate the remotest probabilities in nature, I still wouldn't understand how the Cubs could go 96 years without a pennant.

BLOCK: Aaron Freeman, writer and performer, is a lifelong resident of Chicago.

MICHELE NORRIS (Host): This is NPR, National Public Radio.

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