## What-If 0001: "Relativistic Baseball"

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dragonfiremalus
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### Re: What-If 0001: Relativistic Baseball

The main thing about 6.08(b) is that in the scenario, the ball is actually passing through the strike zone, therefore it doesn't matter whether or not he was hit or whether or not he swung. Therefore, the only possible way to avoid the strike is if the batter then manages to hit a fair ball (6.09(a)) or if the catcher or another fielder somehow interfered with the swing (6.09(c)). One could perhaps argue that the reactions caused by the pitcher throwing a ball at 0.9c in fact do interfere with the swing, and therefore he is entitled to a base as long as the batter's team manager does not elect to overlook the interference and accept the play (also 6.09(c)). Another interesting consideration is to ask exactly how far away from the pitcher the ball was accelerated to .9c, because if it was released and then accelerated far enough away, then from the ball's point of view the batter, catcher, and home plate ump could actually be disintegrated before the pitcher. Let's see, if the ball was accelerated to .9c immediately after release, then the fusion reactions would be happening approximately .6m away from the center of the pitcher (for ease we will call it 2 nano light seconds), and the batter is 70nls away (from the perspective of the stands). This leaves us with the interesting observation that from the ball's perspective, the batter actually gets vaporized at 16ns and the pitcher at 11ns. So if the ball was traveling a bit faster, at .9444c, they would both die at the same time from the perspective of the ball.

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### Re: What-If 0001: Relativistic Baseball

Yakk wrote:So I've noted that treating things as chemicals is silly. Given that the KE is ~2 orders of magnitude higher than the binding energy of nuclei, should treating the particles as atoms be equally silly? Probably. The energy lost by splitting the nucleus is far below the threshold of the napkin math I'm doing.

I considered going this far in my earlier post on a similar subject, but I believe (and real physicists please correct me) that a nucleus can't really be accurately modeled as individual nucleons stuck together, but rather acts as a kind of single large particle which comes apart into protons and neutrons when smashed up hard enough. I'm pretty sure the analog of that is true of the nucleons and their constituent quarks, at least; a proton isn't just three quarks stuck together, it's a proton, and if you destroy that proton three quarks will briefly exist in the aftermath before they recombine into another composite particle, but those composite particles aren't just the aggregate of some quarks. That is, while they are forming a proton, there actually aren't three separate quarks in there. It's like the difference between a hunk of hydrogen, a hunk of oxygen, a hunk of sodium, and a hunk of chloride all bound together, vs a hunk of saline; the quarks, analogously, "dissolve" into each other to form a proton or neutron, instead of staying separate particles. And if I'm not mistaken, nucleons do the same with each other in forming atomic nuclei, no?
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steve waterman
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### Re: What-If 0001: Relativistic Baseball

iamspen wrote:I realize he can throw the ball at 0.9c, but man, that pitcher has some poor mechanics.

The baseball has increased its given mass and has shortened its diameter, relatively speaking, I believe, according to accepted theory.

A baseball second is no longer equal to a pitcher second.
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### Re: What-If 0001: Relativistic Baseball

But we don't really care what things look like from the baseball's perspective, since there is no one living in the baseball with a tiny little measuring stick and stopwatch. And its mass doesn't really increase, but the total mass-energy of course does, since that is equal to $$mc^2\gamma(v)$$.
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TomCanary
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### Re: What-If 0001: Relativistic Baseball

Pfhorrest wrote:
jello34543 wrote:It is my understanding that if any part of the ball passes through the strike zone, it is a strike.

Not that this is directly relevant, but: what if the ball deflects off the batter, then through the strike zone?

The rule is that the strike zone is a two dimensional box at the front of home plate. So, for example, a ball that passes the front of home plate in the strike zone and then immediately makes a left turn so that it hits the batter (assuming the batter is left handed) would be a strike. A ball that passes the front of home plate outside of the strike zone, hits the batter, and then goes over the plate would be a "HIT BY PITCH" since the ball would be unable to head back towards the pitcher and then stop and head to the catcher to cross over the strike zone at the front of home plate. This also means that a curveball that passes outside of the strike zone at the front of home plate and then curves into the strike zone would be a ball. The strike zone is not three dimensional.

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### Re: What-If 0001: Relativistic Baseball

Pfhorrest wrote:
Yakk wrote:So I've noted that treating things as chemicals is silly. Given that the KE is ~2 orders of magnitude higher than the binding energy of nuclei, should treating the particles as atoms be equally silly? Probably. The energy lost by splitting the nucleus is far below the threshold of the napkin math I'm doing.

I considered going this far in my earlier post on a similar subject, but I believe (and real physicists please correct me) that a nucleus can't really be accurately modeled as individual nucleons stuck together, but rather acts as a kind of single large particle which comes apart into protons and neutrons when smashed up hard enough. I'm pretty sure the analog of that is true of the nucleons and their constituent quarks, at least; a proton isn't just three quarks stuck together, it's a proton, and if you destroy that proton three quarks will briefly exist in the aftermath before they recombine into another composite particle, but those composite particles aren't just the aggregate of some quarks. That is, while they are forming a proton, there actually aren't three separate quarks in there. It's like the difference between a hunk of hydrogen, a hunk of oxygen, a hunk of sodium, and a hunk of chloride all bound together, vs a hunk of saline; the quarks, analogously, "dissolve" into each other to form a proton or neutron, instead of staying separate particles. And if I'm not mistaken, nucleons do the same with each other in forming atomic nuclei, no?

My understanding is that when a nucleus is bombarded and split, the sum of the parts is less than the total of protons and neutrons. each element in turn, has a unique "packing factor".

Physics merely calculates the missing mass. The percentage of missing mass to the original mass,is called "packing factor."

Quarks are composed of "gluons", like those of Contact capsules commercials. Gluons have weird properties.
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### Re: What-If 0001: Relativistic Baseball

When elements heavier than iron are split, the mass-energy in their remnants is indeed less than in the original nucleus. This is why fissioning heavy elements releases energy.

For small elements, though, it's the opposite. The bigger nucleus has more mass-energy than an equal number of nucleons separated out. This is why the fusion of light elements produces energy.

Going the opposite direction then, fusioning heavy elements requires an input of energy (which is why they are only formed in extremely energetic settings like supernovae), as does fissioning smaller ones.

As I said before, though, the total amount of energy required to fission *every* atom in the baseball would only be a percent or so of its total kinetic energy, leaving us with still pretty much all of a 4mt explosion to worry about.
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### Re: What-If 0001: Relativistic Baseball

TomCanary wrote:
Pfhorrest wrote:
jello34543 wrote:It is my understanding that if any part of the ball passes through the strike zone, it is a strike.

Not that this is directly relevant, but: what if the ball deflects off the batter, then through the strike zone?

The rule is that the strike zone is a two dimensional box at the front of home plate. So, for example, a ball that passes the front of home plate in the strike zone and then immediately makes a left turn so that it hits the batter (assuming the batter is left handed) would be a strike. A ball that passes the front of home plate outside of the strike zone, hits the batter, and then goes over the plate would be a "HIT BY PITCH" since the ball would be unable to head back towards the pitcher and then stop and head to the catcher to cross over the strike zone at the front of home plate. This also means that a curveball that passes outside of the strike zone at the front of home plate and then curves into the strike zone would be a ball. The strike zone is not three dimensional.

I'm trying to find a part of this post that isn't false… yes, the strike zone is three-dimensional… even if it were not, a pitch could bounce off the batter and through it, since the batter could be ahead of the plate… yet it would still be hit by pitch, and not a strike, but not for your erroneous reasons… and a batter can be hit by a ball after it has exited the strike zone and be awarded a base… nope, every part wrong, sorry.
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Pfhorrest
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### Re: What-If 0001: Relativistic Baseball

gmalivuk wrote:the total amount of energy required to fission *every* atom in the baseball

Is that to split everything all the way down to raw hydrogen, or just to split the carbon into boron, etc?

(Odd timing: TMBG's "The Sun" just came on my Pandora. "The sun is a mass of incandescent gas, a gigantic nuclear furnace, where hydrogen is turned into helium at a temperature of millions of degrees...")
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### Re: What-If 0001: Relativistic Baseball

As pointed out by others, I doubt that fusion would be at all interesting here. 0.9c is way too hot, and there is no confinement or compression. Energy would be absorbed by disassociating the light nuclei C, N, & O into nucleons. You would thus have some amount of free neutrons running around, but they would be relativistic and escape to large distances before being absorbed. It's possible that a trivial level of fusion reactions would take place in a cooler halo around the ball, but the circumstances are not right for this to happen in a big way.

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### Re: What-If 0001: Relativistic Baseball

Free neutrons and photons.

There is even enough to break up the protons and neutrons into components.(you can tell because the binding energy of protons and neutrons is basically their mass). But only barely.
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gmalivuk
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### Re: What-If 0001: Relativistic Baseball

Yeah, the "percent or so" was a back-of-the-envelope for completely breaking down into individual nucleons, starting with 145 moles of nucleons with an average of 8 MeV binding energy per nucleon.
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JustDoug
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### Re: What-If 0001: Relativistic Baseball

rmsgrey wrote:Of course, at sufficiently high speeds (.9c may well not be high enough) the relativistic baseball simply isn't around long enough to dump enough energy to cause a problem - most of the energy ends up carried into deep space rather than forming a mushroom cloud in the stadium. Sure, individual atoms in the way get shredded, but surely there just isn't time for much of the energy to get dumped into the surroundings...

You'd need there to be enough mass in the way to drop the ball's speed down to around the (local) speed of sound for energy to bleed off significantly - an air-atom colliding with a ball-atom will give two atoms still traveling at nearly half the speed of light in the ball's original direction - you need to slow down a lot before any lateral component of motion becomes significant.

Run a pipe from the pitching mound to "outer space" along the path your pitched ball is going to travel along. What's in the pipe? Your ball has to run through all that to make its escape.

Air's heavier than you think and a LOT more dense than a vacuum. Air might be transparent to light, but rawhide has to bash its way through it.

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### Re: What-If 0001: Relativistic Baseball

So what we've really got is a baseball-sized glob of quark-gluon plasma right on the verge of consolidating back into baryonic matter, then? Or is that just what our baseball ends up as somewhere between its magic acceleration and when everything presumable eventually settled back down to baryons again? If the latter, at what point does the baseball become such a plasma, and when does it cease to be?

Also, if fissioning light elements requires an input of energy, will the products of that fission tend to refuse once the energy is gone; the way an ionic plasma will cool to a gas as the electrons are recaptured by the nuclei, or a quark-gluon plasma will cool back to baryonic matter? If so, is there a name for such a state of temporarily-split atoms waiting cool and refuse into the elements they were before? Another kind of plasma I would presume; dissociate the electrons from the nuclei to get ionic plasma, dissociate to the nucleons from each other to get some other plasma, dissociate the quarks in those nucleons from each other to get a quark-gluon plasma?
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### Re: What-If 0001: Relativistic Baseball

It doesn't turn into quark-gluon plasma, or even have its atoms break up, until it hits something. The ball's frame of reference is perfectly valid, and in it the ball is stationary, and the planet is hurtling in the opposite direction.

I think the blueshift factor will be something like 3? That (to my naive eye) doesn't look like it would make photons that you run into all that hot. (IIRC, energy is ~ frequency, and frequency goes up by a factor of 3-4 at 0.9 c, which isn't enough for things to go pear-shaped).

Any atoms that you run into, however, end up hitting really, really hard. While they won't be ionized like typical cosmic rays, they also won't be repelled by E-M as they approach a neutron.

I am guessing the collisions we care about are only those where the nucleus of the atoms intersect. If we assume that the atoms of the baseball are randomly arranged, and made uniformly out of carbon 12, with a nuclear radius of 2.7 x 10^-15 m. The ball has a 7.5 cm diameter, so a volume of 211 cm^3. If we presume density like water, that is 211 grams, or 17.5 *NA C-12 atoms, or 10^25 atoms.

The ball has a cross-section of 44 cm^2, or 0.0044 m^2. Using the assumption that the atoms are sparse (and hence overlap is minimal) the atoms have a total cross-section of 10^25 * pi (2.7 * 10^-15 m)^2 = 22.9 10^-5 m^2 = 0.000229 m^2, or about 5% of the cross-section of the ball.

At the speeds that the ball is going at, no significant collision should happen unless we get something like a direct hit -- getting near to the nucleus might tear both atoms apart (as the binding energy is quite low), but I don't see how they would interact enough for a significant amount of energy to transfer from the ball to an air molecule unless their nuclei overlapped (and even then, would they actually interact? This is way beyond my expertise).

Electrons are carrying so little of the energy that hitting them (which will be more common) shouldn't have a significant impact.

Anyhow, that 5% number means my estimate of how much air it would take to stop the ball goes up by a factor of 20, to ~40 km, which is enough to clear the vast majority of the Earth's atmosphere even on an oblique angle -- and my numbers are still really, really crude. Without a backstop behind the catcher, the ball might make it out of the solar system!

Anyone with enough particle physics to figure out what the collision cross section of the proton and neutrons of the baseball and the air protons and neutrons would be, given the relative velocities?
One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision - BR

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steve waterman
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### Re: What-If 0001: Relativistic Baseball

I wonder ?

what shape is a photon ?

does a photon have mass or not ?
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/ParticleAndNuclear/photon_mass.html

how does one distinguish a neutron from an anti-neutron ?
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### Re: What-If 0001: Relativistic Baseball

Yakk wrote:It doesn't turn into quark-gluon plasma, or even have its atoms break up, until it hits something. The ball's frame of reference is perfectly valid, and in it the ball is stationary, and the planet is hurtling in the opposite direction.
...
Anyhow, that 5% number means my estimate of how much air it would take to stop the ball goes up by a factor of 20, to ~40 km, which is enough to clear the vast majority of the Earth's atmosphere even on an oblique angle -- and my numbers are still really, really crude. Without a backstop behind the catcher, the ball might make it out of the solar system!

Anyone with enough particle physics to figure out what the collision cross section of the proton and neutrons of the baseball and the air protons and neutrons would be, given the relative velocities?

You got halfway there. Instead of a moving baseball, consider a column of air just over 18 meters (distance of pitcher's mound to home plate) in length accelerated to .9C using Randall's Magic Accelerator striking a stationary baseball (with plenty of surrounding stuff to sop up the overflow).

Look what happens at the end of a linear accelerator when all that's involved is some dirty vacuum being slung at it- or when they dump the beam at the LHC. The speed is (well, almost) comparable, and there's plenty of short-stopping-not-getting-to-orbit going on there.

Also, his isn't a simple single impact, even at these implausible speeds. There's a whole lotta stuff involved; a lot more than a single nucleus or even a smidgeon of ionized dirty vacuum. Also, classical Newtonian principles of momentum tend to not work well when dealing with things at the "leftovers from kablooey" subatomic level. Energy is odd that way.

I'm certain that someone who really, +really+ knows this stuff (either someone in weapons design, a real high energy physics person or Stephen Strasburg) will tell us why we're wrong, but until then, I'm pretty certain that the rather energetic reaction of this particular thought experiment would remain a very local one- relatively speaking.

But the neatest part of all this, if it could really be done, is that it would make the LHC look like a damp cap next to a nuke. Admittedly, observing results might be a problem, though.

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### Re: What-If 0001: Relativistic Baseball

steve waterman wrote:what shape is a photon ?

Not applicable.

steve waterman wrote:does a photon have mass or not ?

Not rest mass.

steve waterman wrote:how does one distinguish a neutron from an anti-neutron ?

Set it down on the table. If it explodes, it was an anti-neutron; otherwise, it was just a neutron.
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### Re: What-If 0001: Relativistic Baseball

Pfhorrest wrote:
steve waterman wrote:what shape is a photon ?

Not applicable.

steve waterman wrote:does a photon have mass or not ?

Not rest mass.

steve waterman wrote:how does one distinguish a neutron from an anti-neutron ?

Set it down on the table. If it explodes, it was an anti-neutron; otherwise, it was just a neutron.

You can remove the "set it down on the table" part, if it's an anti-neutron which isn't in a magnetically levitated container with a hard vacuum inside of it, then it already blew up.
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### Re: What-If 0001: Relativistic Baseball

Pfhorrest wrote:
steve waterman wrote:what shape is a photon ?

Not applicable.

steve waterman wrote:does a photon have mass or not ?

Pfhorrest wrote:Not rest mass.

steve waterman wrote:how does one distinguish a neutron from an anti-neutron ?

Pfhorrest wrote:Set it down on the table. If it explodes, it was an anti-neutron; otherwise, it was just a neutron.

steve waterman wrote:what shape is a photon ?

Pfhorrest wrote:Not applicable.

Instead of a particle or a wave, I wonder if a cluster of spheres might help explain the double-slit experiment.
I wonder, have we ever tried a triangle, a square, a pentagon, or hexagon of holes...what their patterns would be?

steve waterman wrote:does a photon have mass or not ?

Pfhorrest wrote:Not rest mass.

What about not at rest mass?

steve waterman wrote:how does one distinguish a neutron from an anti-neutron ?

Pfhorrest wrote:Set it down on the table. If it explodes, it was an anti-neutron; otherwise, it was just a neutron.

steve waterman wrote:What physical difference in the two charge-less particles causes them to exhibit different physical properties?
Why does one explode and the other not explode?
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### Re: What-If 0001: Relativistic Baseball

Wave/particle duality does a *much* better job of explaining observations than weird things like "maybe it's a triangle".

Photons are always not-at-rest, and they do carry momentum and energy.

Antineutrons are made up of antiquarks, I believe.
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### Re: What-If 0001: Relativistic Baseball

gmalivuk wrote:Antineutrons are made up of antiquarks, I believe.

Yep, which (more to the point of Steve's question) have the same quantum number and spin as regular quarks, but opposite charges. So while a neutron and an antineutron both have the same (zero) charge, mass, spin, and most other properties -- which I believe was the point Steve was making ("what is different, then?") -- a neutron is made of an up quark and two down quarks (and so has a charge of 2/3 - 1/3 - 1/3 = 0), but an antineutron is made of an antiup quark and two antidown quarks (and so has a charge of -2/3 + 1/3 + 1/3 = 0 again).

A hydrogen atom and an antihydrogen atom also have the same (zero) charge, mass, spin, and most other properties -- but when you look inside them you see a proton and an electron vs an antiproton and positron, which are clearly eachother's antiparticles. A neutron and antineutron are similar, just on a smaller scale.
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### Re: What-If 0001: Relativistic Baseball

An anti-up and an up quark walk into a bar ħ and request two beers, they ask how much it is, and the bartender says "for you two? no cha-" then the bar exploded.

I was tempted to make a "hey, you two can't be in here alone" joke, but couldn't work it in properly.
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### Re: What-If 0001: Relativistic Baseball

Pfhorrest wrote:[...] I believe (and real physicists please correct me) that a nucleus can't really be accurately modeled as individual nucleons stuck together, but rather acts as a kind of single large particle which comes apart into protons and neutrons when smashed up hard enough. I'm pretty sure the analog of that is true of the nucleons and their constituent quarks, at least; a proton isn't just three quarks stuck together, it's a proton, and if you destroy that proton three quarks will briefly exist in the aftermath before they recombine into another composite particle, but those composite particles aren't just the aggregate of some quarks. That is, while they are forming a proton, there actually aren't three separate quarks in there.

I am not a Real Physicist, but I'm happy to attempt to correct you.

At low energies (relative to the nuclear binding energy) a nucleus can be treated as a single particle, but it's misleading to think of it as static blob. Particles in a totally static blob have no uncertainty in their position and zero momentum with respect to their centre of mass (and hence zero uncertainty in their momentum), which is impossible according to the uncertainty principle. So the nucleons in a nucleus aren't just stuck together, they are dancing around one another, with a shell pattern that is very similar to the electron shell pattern of an atom (with some important differences).

The nucleons don't exactly dissolve into one another, but they are dynamically interacting via the residual strong force, so they exchange mesons (pions, kaons & eta mesons) with each other. This meson exchange results in the nucleons effectively swapping identities. So (for example) if you bind a proton and a neutron together to make a deuteron (the simplest composite nuclide) and then pull the deuteron apart again, you can't say that the proton you pull out of the deuteron is the same one that went in. In fact, while in the deuteron each nucleon is in a mixed state of being a proton and a neutron, i.e., it has a probability of being detected as a proton or as a neutron, and this mixed state must be taken into account when calculating the stability of the deuteron. For more on this topic see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isospin.

Quarks cannot exist in isolation, they are always bound together in pairs or triplets. Even if you blast a hadron into pieces in a high speed collision, you never get lone quarks produced, they are always attached to another quark or two (I'm using the term "quark" to cover both quarks and anti-quarks).

Quarks interact with each other via the strong nuclear force (aka the color charge) as well as electromagnetically. The symmetries associated with the color charge are a little more complicated than those of electromagnetism. And it has an important property that's radically different to electromagnetism: no particle has ever been observed with a net non-zero color charge, this is known as color confinement. So we can't directly detect the color charge, the only way we know about the properties of the color charge is by analyzing the symmetries of quark behaviour.

Still, inside a nucleon (or other hadron) the quarks are distinct entities, to a degree. Although they engage in identity swapping shenanigans, swapping colors (via gluon exchange) and flavours (via W and Z boson exchange), and they are always associated with a cloud of virtual particles, the quarks in a proton or neutron can be detected as individual charge centres by blasting high speed electrons at them.

When quarks are close to one another, they don't exert very much strong force on each other, but as the distance between them increases the force gets stronger, due to the mechanics of the cloud of virtual gluons (and virtual quarks). This is known as asymptotic freedom. A common analogy to describe this behaviour is that the gluon stream binding quarks together acts like an elastic band. When the quarks are close together the "band" is loose and has almost no effect, but as the quarks separate the band is stretched and it gets harder to separate the quarks further. If you stretch the band sufficiently, it snaps, releasing energy in the form of brand new quarks, maintaining color confinement. This gets a bit complicated, as gluons themselves have color charge, and the quark-gluon tube assembly as a whole is forced to be color neutral at all times.

I am also happy for a real particle physicist to correct me.

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### Re: What-If 0001: Relativistic Baseball

Wow, before he answers another question, he should write that question down here, let you guys debate about it over a week with several dozen TL;DR post and then just summarize it.

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### Re: What-If 0001: Relativistic Baseball

NukemHill wrote:
A careful reading of official Major League Baseball Rule 6.08(b) suggests that in this situation, the batter would be considered "hit by pitch", and would be eligible to advance to first base.

Frankly, that pitcher's facing a hell of a fine. After all, he's just thrown at the batter ... the umpire, the on-deck hitter, the entire bench for both teams ... every fan in the stands ... and every living creature within a square mile.

The pitcher would probably still have a better chance of entering the Hall of Fame than Pete Rose.

iamspen
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### Re: What-If 0001: Relativistic Baseball

Elirra wrote:The pitcher would probably still have a better chance of entering the Hall of Fame than Pete Rose.

OH, SNAP!

Spoiler:
My girlfriend did a bit of work on documentary 4192, for which Rose said he would only involve himself if there was no mention of the gambling scandal. It's a shame Selig, who might be the worst commissioner since Kenesaw Landis, won't publicly reconsider Rose's situation, even if the ban is upheld.

steve waterman
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### Re: What-If 0001: Relativistic Baseball

could the curve ball of light, be doing this?

whenever I see the EM wave depicted, it is always like this.

Notice that there should also be another E and another H, as the EM wave disappears.

It seems unbalanced, and i wonder how it maintains a straight direction, being lop-sided, as depicted.

i would think the EM wave would actually make a spiral, not a straight line, under those conditions.

has experimental evidence proved that the EM wave is not as depiction below?

i do realize the unlikeliness of this, and would like to rule it out as a possibility.

Are there any quantifiers/mathematics as to the 1/2 oval shapes themselves.

Who should i research to find the derivation of this two-lobe manifestation...Hertz? Maxwell? Others?

Thanks for any information or urls regarding the experimental derivation of the EM two-lobe wave format.

gmalivuk wrote:Wave/particle duality does a *much* better job of explaining observations than weird things like "maybe it's a triangle".

You mixed up two concepts, I believe.

i suggest that the double-slit experiment has never been tried with as a triple-slit.

I conject, that in place of the wave/duality conundrum, that a "photon" is a cluster of equal spheres. These spheres are way way way smaller then any gluon or Higgs-Boson. That is, this assertion is that photons have different masses and manifest their finger-print spectral lines, due exclusively/mathematically from the external parameter of the clusters. Indeed, sphere clusters have two distinct fields types externally. One, centered the x,y,z axis directions is triangularal/hexagonal format. The other field locations are at the 8 x=y=z axis, where now the packing is done is formatted into square matrix, [ regardless of cluster quanta ( number of spheres in the sphere cluster).]
"While statistics and measurements can be misleading, mathematics itself, is not subjective."
"Be careful of what you believe, you are likely to make it the truth."
steve

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### Re: What-If 0001: Relativistic Baseball

steve waterman wrote:could the curve ball of light, be doing this?

whenever I see the EM wave depicted, it is always like this.

Notice that there should also be another E and another M, as the EM wave disappears into depiction.

[img]http://www.watermanpolyhedron.com/images/EM-wave.gif[img]

It seems unbalanced, and i wonder how it maintains a straight direction, being lop-sided, as depicted.

i would think the EM wave would actually make a spiral, not a straight line, under those conditions.

If the waves were not in phase they wouldn't make a straight line... and it's a good thing that they generally are in phase, otherwise we'd have to deal with the spiral nemesis!

has experimental evidence proved that the EM wave is not as depiction below?

i do realize the unlikeliness of this, and would like to rule it out as a possibility.

Are there any quantifiers/mathematics as to the 1/2 oval shapes themselves.

Who should i research to find the derivation of this two-lobe manifestation...Hertz? Maxwell? Others?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light is a good start.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_equations

It isn't two lobes, it's the E and B portion.

i suggest that the double-slit experiment has never been tried with as a triple-slit.

http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/new ... est-ordeal

Just for fun: http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&featu ... sxo-IdcuH0
mu

steve waterman
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### Re: What-If 0001: Relativistic Baseball

steve wrote:i suggest that the double-slit experiment has never been tried with as a triple-slit.

http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/new ... est-ordeal

The measurement begins with the creation of a single photon that is fired at a mask with three slits – each 30 µm wide and separated by 100 µm

This sounds as if the three points are in a line. I wonder if the three points are the vertex of an equilateral triangle, what the fringe pattern is then?

It also seems to imply that a single photon goes through the three holes simultaneously?
[ If so for three holes, the distances to the holed screen are not equal. ]
"While statistics and measurements can be misleading, mathematics itself, is not subjective."
"Be careful of what you believe, you are likely to make it the truth."
steve

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### Re: What-If 0001: Relativistic Baseball

h / Wave interference patterns photographed by Prof. Lyman Page with a digital camera. Laser light with a single well-defined wavelength passed through a series of absorbers to cut down its intensity, then through a set of slits to produce interference, and finally into a digital camera chip. (A triple slit was actually used, but for conceptual simplicity we discuss the results in the main text as if it was a double slit.) In panel 2 the intensity has been reduced relative to 1, and even more so for panel 3.

mu

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### Re: What-If 0001: Relativistic Baseball

Thank you.
One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision - BR

Last edited by JHVH on Fri Oct 23, 4004 BCE 6:17 pm, edited 6 times in total.

J.D. KaPow
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### Re: What-If 0001: Relativistic Baseball

Pfhorrest wrote:Not that this is directly relevant, but: what if the ball deflects off the batter, then through the strike zone?
As soon as the ball hits the batter, it is dead - nothing that happens after that matters. However, if the ball passes through the strike zone and then hits the batter (and the batter, who's leaning right into the strike zone, is ruled to have made no attempt to get out of the way), that's a strike.

J.D. KaPow
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### Re: What-If 0001: Relativistic Baseball

iamspen wrote:I realize he can throw the ball at 0.9c, but man, that pitcher has some poor mechanics.
Yeah, just think what he'll be able to do after he gets some decent coaching.

steve waterman
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### Re: What-If 0001: Relativistic Baseball

Thank you.

How does one initiate such a thread??
"While statistics and measurements can be misleading, mathematics itself, is not subjective."
"Be careful of what you believe, you are likely to make it the truth."
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### Re: What-If 0001: Relativistic Baseball

Go to a forum view, click "New topic." Make sure you're in the right forum first.
Nothing rhymes with orange,
Not even sporange.

gmalivuk
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### Re: What-If 0001: Relativistic Baseball

And note that this is not the right forum, and also I will lock any thread you try to start in Mathematics about your crank notions of coordinate transforms.
Unless stated otherwise, I do not care whether a statement, by itself, constitutes a persuasive political argument. I care whether it's true.
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Almost in register
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### Re: What-If 0001: Relativistic Baseball

In the joke at the end, Randall wrote:A careful reading of official Major League Baseball Rule 6.08(b) suggests that in this situation, the batter would be considered "hit by pitch", and would be eligible to advance to first base.

But earlier in the article, he wrote:When it reaches the batter, the center of the cloud is still moving at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light. It hits the bat first, but then the batter, plate, and catcher [where's the umpire here?] are all scooped up and carried backward through the backstop as they disintegrate.

A pitched ball that hits the bat first and then immediately hits the batter is a foul ball. I do question, however, whether it would actually hit the bat first. Assuming the batter isn't squared around to bunt, wouldn't it hit his front shoulder, elbow, or leg before anything else? (Maybe the batter has a stance like Kevin Youkilis.)

capefeather
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### Re: What-If 0001: Relativistic Baseball

Somehow I doubt that this was *quite* the kind of answer Ellen McManis expected. Perhaps the situation was supposed to be in a vacuum, or the batter was supposed to be "invincible" enough to hit the ball no matter what. Either assumption would probably lead to equally spectacular results, though.

iamspen
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### Re: What-If 0001: Relativistic Baseball

Interestingly, if one reads the rule and determines the pitched ball is a strike (it, IMO), the the batter cannot strike out in this situation if the count is x-2, because some of the superheated baseball junk will presumably make contact with the bat. Thus, unless the catcher manages to catch the baseball particles before being wiped from existence, even if the parts of the pall pass through the strike zone, it would be considered a foul ball.