It’s not that, as an American, I think that the world revolves around me.

It’s just that I don’t care what others think about me. I know that I am a good person, and I also prefer my country’s culture, as you prefer yours, I’m sure.

Just Google “cricket ball dynamics”. Well, well even NASA has studied the cricket ball! Now read down the rest of the page and see the scholarly articles. I’m not going to list them, because I’m too lazy. But if you have any curiosity whatsoever, google it. Then you won’t be one of the boorish Americans the world has to suffer.

Hmmm…which is it?

My father played fast pitch softball in the 1950s and ’60s when it was a popular sport for adults. He was a pitcher. After he left the game and I was in my teens we would play catch in the backyard and sometimes he would feel loose enough to “air it out” like he once had. He could make the ball curve up, down, left, or right (riser, drop, curve, screwball), and his knuckleball corkscrewed (as WolfManDragon mentioned) its way to the plate, then dropped and broke either left or right (never knew which) as it crossed the plate.

I remember reading a story, I think from the 1930s or ’40s, about a scientist who stated that a curveball doesn’t really curve, its appearing to is just an optical illusion. A major league pitcher of the era was asked what he thought of the assertion and replied, “If he’ll stand behind a tree sixty feet and six inches from me I’ll whomp him to death with an optical illusion.”

Great article and comments.

This reminds me of how the first world war was called a ‘world’ war even though there were only 6 countries fighting, Europe in those days considered themselves to be the entire world. It looks like its happening to america now. Whatever they think and do seems to be what goes. Get your facts and statistics right, consider the rest of the world before you come up with more stuff like this.”

Why do I come across so many raving diatribes on this subject? Nobody is disputing that soccer is the most popular sport in the world. After seeing all these pointless debates on whether soccer or football is the “correct” word, I am convinced that people will argue just about anything along nationalist boundaries. Believe or not, they’re both correct, so there’s no reason to get bent out of shape because somebody uses a different word than you.

I cannot verify the article’s claim that baseball is the world’s most studied sport, but I certainly wouldn’t count it out. There has been pretty massive research done not only on the physics of the game, but also involving statistical analysis. The last several years, baseball has really innovated the use of extensive advanced statistics, and that has started to spread to other sports including soccer as seen below.

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/osm/story/0,,2002909,00.html

It is also in baseball where fantasy sports originated and various medical procedures have been pioneered.

For the record, there is such a thing as a rising fast ball. It only takes getting hit by one to make a beleiver out of one.

I think a physicist ought to have time to his or her diversions, just like everyone else. After all, perhaps those physicists are not fond of gardening or cooking, and need something to do in the evenings. During the day they cannot because they are far too busy trying to find that Theory of Everything.”

Actually, there is funding for studying things like this from the sporting goods industry. My college’s aerospace engineering department had a contract to study aluminum baseball and softball bats. They built a gun to fire balls at bats and developed ways to study the impacts.

As for the point the world revolves around, that would generally be the point where the speaker is standing. To each person (in a broad, general sense) the world revolves around where they live. The exceptions are the people who are trying to accomplish things in parts of the world where they are not present. In India, I imagine the world halfway revolves around India, and halfway around the U.S., considering how many phone tech and customer support centers have been outsourced there… they are on the phone with the U.S. for a huge part of their waking hours (the people working those jobs there, not all people in India).

Likewise, there are parts of China where the world revolves around Japan.