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Playing Ball in Space
oo7tushar writes "Although most experiments in space seem simple they have profound results. Take this for example, astronauts trying to catch a ball in space. What's so hard about that? Nothing much really, down here on Earth. In space it's a completely different story.
Here on earth our eyes see the ball and our brain anticipates it's movement according to gravity. In space the brain continues to anticpate gravity but unlike motion sickness (which is adapted to within days), astronauts continue to anticipate the path of a ball for 15 days (after which they start to show progress).
What are the ramifications? The brain must have some sort of internal gravitation model."
this article. Oh well..
proton != antielectron
Also, I'm guessing these guys are in their thirties. Now, had they been in a weightless environmentr for those 30 odd years they could easily catch a ball in those conditions, but I bet they'd fail to do it in our gravity.
This isn't an "inbuilt" ability, its practise
Get the EULA T-shirt
but tacos link goes to his home page, insted of his e-mail. Oh well, as long as hits on his web page are more important, then i dont feel guilty about karma whoring.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/03/18/205
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
Err, what?
You claim a 50% INCREASE in g due to higher centrifugal force (current is 9.8ms^-2). This is clearly nonsense. Also: "100 million years ago the Earth's day was only about 18 hours long." is very unlikely - The geology doesn't bear it out at all (and yes I do have a degree in geology, so I may know what I'm on about).
Even if our day lasted only 12 current hours, that would not result in 50% of our current gravity - the mass of the earth masks any such effect. The variation of g from the pole (no angular motion) to the equator (max angular motion) is only about 0.6ms^-2.
Finally, there's no such thing as centrifugal force - it's simply the tendency of objects to continue in a straight line. Any high school student studying physics should be able to tell you that.
*sigh*
IIRC there is some study about eyesight that seems to think that the brain adjusts within about 2 weeks as well... an experiment was done where people wore glasses that inverted vision, however after 2 weeks the brain had "corrected" this and vision appeared returned to "normal"
IIRC this also led to the conclusion that babies see updside down for the first 2 weeks of there lives before the brain "fixes" the problem....
;-)
of course i could be making it all up
A monkey in every office....
I thought this stupid thread would've died already, but since it hasn't let's use some high school physics to show how wrong you are.
*Suppose* that 100 million years ago the earth's day were only 18 hours long. I don't know if it was, but suppose that.
Then the measured gravity acceleration would be
g = g_0 - Rw^2, where w is omega (the earth's period)
w = 2pi/64800
g = 9.8 - 6,37e6*(9.7e-5)^2 = 9.8 - 0.06 = 9.74 m/s^2
So I can't see how g could've been about 15.2 m/s^2, because reducing earth's period doesn't make much of a difference (as many people have stated without proof before me).
What amazes me is that you state that g was actually HIGHER (15.2 m/s^2) back in that day. Would you mind elucidating that?
"I suspect a well practiced juggler could adjust to the diffences in Space fairly quickly."
This has already been done. Senator Jake Garn is a juggler, and attempted to juggle while on a space shuttle mission in 1985. They also played with Slinkys, Yo-yos, and Wheel-Os.
Ralph
I juggle.
;)
Actually, a whole lot of juggling is putting your hand in the right place at the right time. You're not really watching all the balls in the air, if you're doing more than 3. If anything, a juggler relies on the anticipation *more* to catch a ball than say, a baseball outfielder, who can just follow the single ball in with his vision.
That being said, and getting back to the humor, yeah, I bet I could catch the ball better than those physics guys any day.
I've read that book, and yes, you're correct. That was the first thing that came to mind when I read that article.
BTW, that series is really good if all you've read of his books is the Hitchhiker series.
No sig for you.