Basketball Physics, with NBA Legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. Welcome to the Hall of the Universe. I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. And tonight, we're going to explore the science of basketball. And to do that, we are featuring my interview with NBA legend, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Whoo! So let's do this! All right. My co-hosts, comedian Chuck Nice. Tweeting at Chuck Nice Comic? Yes. Very nice. And also joining me is a friend and colleague, Charles Liu. Charles! He's an astrophysicist with the City University of New York at Staten Island. Longtime friend of the show. And why do we have another astrophysicist on a show about basketball? Because Charles has a certain sort of geek's expertise in so many different things. And you open a portfolio, and we went and basketball was in the portfolio. Of course. I am in parabolic orbit over this show. See, he really is an astrophysicist. I cannot wait. So you're going to help us sort of break down the physics of the game? What a wonderful game. I'd only be able to take it so far, because we both know physics. But you were totally geeked out by it. It is remarkable. You would imagine that a little hoop 18 inches across and a ball just under 10 inches across could not produce as much awesomeness as basketball. So the awesomosity knows no bounds. None. All right, so Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is NBA all-time leading scorer, all-time. Yeah. 38,387 points. But did you know he's also a scholar? Kareem is a prolific cultural columnist and a best-selling author. I don't know if you knew that. I didn't know all that. No wonder you like him. No, and I asked him about that bookish background. So let's check it out and see what happens. You may be like the smartest professional player in any sport that there ever was. I don't know about that. I'm just thinking you're a scholar and I'm an academic, so I focus on that. You've written books. You're thoughtful. Yeah. I think what it all started was the fact that my dad liked to read. My dad was an avid reader. He would sell books by weight and buy them by weight down at those bookstores they have down there on 3rd Avenue. In the old days, yeah. There are no bookstores anymore. So I remember going down there with him a couple of times, but he was an avid reader and I just realized that there was a lot of knowledge in there that I might want to know something about. And that's how I guess I got to be, what do they call it, bookish. So these are the seeds ready to sprout when you were done with basketball. Right. He's written 12 books. 12. Wow. 12 books. He was a regular columnist for Time Magazine on all topics really ever surrounding religion, race and society. And so I just thought this was a brilliant guy. By the way, okay. He also spent 20 seasons in the NBA. Was NBA All-Star for 19 of those 20 years. He spent 14 years with the Lakers. He was a six-time NBA champion. Six-time NBA most valuable player. He did that on the side. He's a failure. Clearly he's done nothing with his life. Kareem really demonstrates how much a misconception it is that athletes are not intellectuals and intellectuals can't be athletes. Because that's a stereotype. That's right. We just pigeonhole people. It's as simple as that. We human beings have a tendency to categorize. And in this kind of way, it's hard to consider someone that can be both physically and intellectually gifted. Furthermore, you have to realize, I hope everybody realizes, that to be athletically effective, you have to be intellectual on whatever playing field that you're on. No. Yes. I'm sorry. You know, I just got to take issue with that. Because by the way, there are some very smart jocks, but there are some very dumb jocks too. I'm sorry. There are. But look, there are some very smart astrophysicists and very dumb astrophysicists. Yes, but the dumbest astrophysicist is the smartest regular person you'll ever meet. You guys actually know guys, and you're like, that dude is an idiot, and he's an astrophysicist, and he looks down on the rest of us. Yeah, yeah. Chuck, he's right. He's kind of a little bit right about that. I'm just saying. Seriously. I'm just saying. So this is just evidence that we pigeonhole people. We don't want them to be more than the one thing they're good at. And I don't really understand that. I don't... Because the truth of the matter is, we can't handle people having it all. Why not? You know what I mean? Seriously. You don't want somebody who is mentally... That's why we laugh at famous people who trip on something in the street. Of course. Something bad has got to happen to something... Because you don't want somebody who is mentally and physically superior. You don't want somebody to have it all. Had Kareem continued his career in basketball longer, he would have done that for a longer period of time before he shifted over to something else, like writing all of his amazing books. Exactly. So now, I want to show y'all a picture of Chuck Liu as a weightlifting champion. Oh, I missed that. Yeah, because it don't exist. Only with my mind. So Kareem, as a basketball player, was most famous for perfecting this accurate deadly shot called the sky hook. Indefensible. Indefensible. So I had to just ask him about his high-flying sky hook. Let's check it out. When I look at a basketball game, part of me sees it as a physicist does. So there's a ball, it's round, there's a hoop, which is bigger than the ball, and there are all manners of shots that come at it from different angles, different trajectories, and your sky hook, your hand at fully extended, it's got to be like eight or nine feet in the air. I mean, did they measure this? When I shot the sky hook, my hand was about between 10 feet and 11 feet in the air. Because you're also jumping? Yeah, I'm also jumping. Okay, so now the rim is 10 feet up. Exactly 10 feet. So the ball is basically going down. So the physics of this, of course, is the more the ball can just go down, the greater chance it has for going in. Right, so you want to shoot a high-arcing shot that drops. That drops. You don't want to just get it to crawl over. Yeah, if it just crawls over, then the cross-section changes. Much smaller. Right, right. I don't know if people know that. So I can take this circle and angle it. The cross-section to you is smaller now. Right, so you want to get your shot to have a high arc and come straight down. Are you thinking about that physics when you were taking that shot? Because you had your physics class. Everything I learned had to do with learning the mechanics of the shot and shooting a bow and arrow because you figure out what the arc is all about and once you got that figured out you become accurate. You're a marksman. So you're a basketball marksman. You have to be. I had all the ballistics and everything worked out. Ballistics. Charles, tell us about some ballistics. Okay. When you shoot something in the air, immediately gravity starts working on it. So no matter what you do, if you shoot something out it's going to head down until it stops downward. So everything about ballistics has to do with how much upward you have to put, how much sideways you have to put, and you always have to keep in track, you always have to keep track of whether or not it's going to go down and when it's going to go down. We looked up the etymology of ballistics. It's like from... Ballista. Why did you know? I'm trying to impress you that a crack team of researchers do this, okay? It's a catapult from the ancient times. I wanted to tell you that, Chuck. Don't worry. I was very impressed. I was very impressed. It's a catapult. Yeah, so it's a great word for a great idea. Yeah, it's tremendous. So when Kareem was talking about the bow and arrow, that's right. A lot of us think that you shoot right for the target. No, you aim above the target because gravity will bring the arrow down. So when Kareem did his skyhook, what he was really doing was combining both the downward trajectory with the upward push of his arm and the fact that he was 10, 11 feet in the air with the ball already. All of that he was calculating in his mind in real time. Another demonstration of why the human brain is the greatest physics computer ever yet created. Okay, why are there grapes here? Because, so here's the great thing. So Kareem was talking about the skyhook and I thought perhaps you guys could actually demonstrate what you just talked about which is the arc of a ball falling into the hoop because what you were talking about there with him was that when the ball crawls over the hoop, there's a smaller area, right, a cross-sectional area for you to aim but when it drops into the hoop is actually bigger and that's what basketball players say, it's like the hoop is bigger and that's what they see when they're shooting. So oh wait, okay, so here we go. See now, look, see he's not all the way, oh there he goes. You're paying for my dry cleaning, dude. Oh! That would be cool, if the rim could move, oh no wait, right, if the rim couldn't move, alright you try me, come on, because I'm going to put my head all the way back, hold on, all the way, wait, wait, wait, here we go. Slam dunk! There we go, but to maximize that chance, I want it to go full up, so I had the full cross section, that's what I'm saying, these are good grapes, they're really hard, I gotta say these are delicious. So, so, so, so Charles, so let me ask, he's obviously for his 38,000th point, he's not doing any calculation at all, it's not built into his sort of neurokinetics, right? That's right, and that's really true also, studies show clearly that at some point repetition allows the nervous system of the brain and the spinal cord and all the ancillary nerves to have something in there even faster than thinking. So your body system works faster than you can reason it out in your head. So here's what I wondered, we got this shot which had deadly accuracy and you know the sky hook and we don't see it anymore. Nobody does the sky hook. We have seven footers in the NBA, they could stick their arm up, they could do the sky hook, but you never see them do what Kareem did and so I had to ask him where it went. Check it out. I took hook shots my whole life and I was pretty good at it. Why doesn't anyone shoot it anymore? I think the hook shot has fallen out of favor because all the kids that are learning how to play the game want to shoot three-pointers. They don't want the ugly two-point shot down there in the paint. The three-point shot has changed the game. That's basically what it is. Alright, so presumably the three-point shot, which is farther away, I think we looked it up at the perimeter. It's 23 feet 9 inches, something like that. In the NBA. In the NBA, right, right. Not the baby three-point shot from college. So presumably you will take the shot if you think you can make it. But it's a lower statistically likelihood shot to take. So are they calculating whether that risk is worth it? Yes, the game has changed quite a bit. But we have numbers on this. So the average in the NBA of all shots is 45%. Yes. Nearly half. The all shots. But that includes three-pointers. Three-point shot average is 35%. Right. Is it worth it? Here's what you do. You do that calculation breakdown. A typical three-point shot will give you, on average, 1.05 points. That means you miss about two-thirds of the time. You get about one, but you get a little bit more. So it's about 1.05 points per shot. A field goal, a two-point shot, only averages about 1.0 to 0.9 points per shot, which means that you actually have a statistical advantage now shooting a three-point shot rather than doing an interior game. And this is what I love about astrophysics, because what he just said was three beats two. Coming up, we'll try to calculate how Kareem Abdul-Jabbar would fare in today's NBA when StarTalk returns. Featuring my interview with NBA great Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. And I had to ask him about the evolution of the game since he retired back in 1989. Check it out. Professional sports has been so touched by technology, by physiology, by health, by strength, fitness. How much of that was going on in your day? I know that sounds like, gee, grandpa, tell us. I don't mean it in that spirit. I'm just talking about the progress of... It's like that, though. The progress of the game. Like if you look at the game in the 1930s, had a jump ball after every basket, no three-point shot. If the whole team scored 30 points, that was an incredibly high-scoring game, you know? Now you have individuals scoring 30 points, and the games are into the hundreds. The game has just really been a barometer of human development in the sport. In 1985, my team, the Lakers, probably the best team I played on, we made 93-point shots between the beginning of the season to the last game of the playoffs. We made 93-point shots. 2015, Golden State Warriors between the first game of the season and the last game of the playoffs made 1,077 three-point shots. And it's amazing. Joining us to help with this conversation about the evolution of the game is NBA analyst Jim Spanarkel. Thanks for being here. As you're not just a pretty face analyst, you were drafted by the NBA and played for the 76ers. I did, yep. Philadelphia, his hometown. And you're currently an analyst for the Brooklyn Nets on the Yes Network. Yeah, I've been doing the Nets for 25 years now. So tell me about sort of the three-point shot over the years, just its trajectory. Ha ha. I think what's occurred more than anything, and Kareem just touched on it, is the evolution of the size and strength of the athlete, which I think goes under-noticed quite often in all sports, but particularly in the NBA. But I also think, and it's kind of a crazy concept, you know, I'll use your kind of analogy here, you know, the galaxy, if you look at the basketball floor, and that's your galaxy, the size of the stars and the planets on there are the players, they're colliding all the time. You didn't think I'd go here with this one, but. You know what, Ashley, I was going to say, you should leave these analogies to these guys. But if you think about it, my point where I'm going with that is part of me thinks that the speed and strength and quickness of athletes, and it applies not only to basketball, but I think if you watch a lot of hockey, these guys are so big and so fast that I think the playing surface is almost too small for the guys on the floor. Because if you think about it, I'm 6'5 and I was a guard. The average size of an NBA player now is give or take 6'8, 230, 235. And if you think about it, the collision of these guys with the free throw line and in has become so tight, so small, there's no room. In the old days, fundamentals won out in basketball. You had to be athletic to play the game, but fundamentals, you had to know when to go backdoor, when to do this, when to do that, and learn the game. But you had to be athletic also. Now I say, this world, you better be very, very athletic to play professional sports now, and you still have to secondarily be fundamental at your craft. So if you look at all the ways one can score, there's foul shots, are people taking about the same number of foul shots in the day? Yeah. In my hood, it was no blood, no foul. So you had to really get hacked before you'd call the game. If you think about the way, the three point shot has definitely changed the game. There's no question about that, right? Because now these guys, the athletes, they're practicing those shots. And one thing I will say about pro athletes, because I'm very fortunate to not only do the NCAA tournament and see the young kids come up, and they're starting at six, seven, eight years of age being recruited, and they're getting better and better, and that's what their craft is going to be. So they've gotten better and better at it. But from the standpoint of understanding what they can do, it's changed the dynamics totally in this particular game. Because in the old days, if you think of basketball, what's the best shot on the floor from a percentage? The layup. Yeah, well, I would say dunk, but the layup, okay. Right, okay, and usually the best number would be a one on zero. So me getting a pass from you and laying it in, one on zero, right? In half court, you can do the same thing. You set your half court up to play two on ones to get angles on the floor to get the basic layup. It's so congested that the game has moved away, compounded with the fact that you have athletes who are stronger, who shoot it, and have been practicing it for longer periods of time. The dynamics just start to take over. And Curry's not a big strong guy, by the way, when you look at him, but he is very strong. He's lean and strong, he's not muscular. Steph Curry, yeah. Steph Curry, who will take 10 three-point shots a game. From the parking lot. But you know what's interesting? When he first started, and if you look at his statistics, I think his numbers for the first three years were about three or four attempts per game. The next three years were three more, about six or seven. Now he's up to 10. So just in Curry's career, it's evolved. Well, here's the thing. So Kareem is over seven feet tall. He's got a skyhook. He took most of his shots near the basket. Correct. So I had to ask him, you had the three point chance. Did you ever shoot the shot? I had to ask him. I mean, why not, right? Let's check it out. I shot 13 and I made one. So your whole career, or you had 10 years, if I did the math right, 10 years of your career was in the presence of the three point line. So you had 13 attempts. And you made one. I made one. So of your 38 billion points, 38,000 points, three of those were a three point shot. One three point shot. So what the hell were you doing? What were you thinking? I'm probably gonna be taken out for taking that shot. Was it, come on guys, give me a chance here, please. No, no, and the one shot that I made, the ball bounced out into the corner and I went and got it and nobody came to guard me. So I stepped back and said, okay, I'll shoot this one. I made it. They should have like bronze that ball and gave it to you. Let me tell you, that is the only three point shot ever made in the history of the NBA, where afterwards, there was shame on the court. Did you see, he like shot that shot and then he was just like, let me get out of here. Maybe no one will notice that I took that shot. He ran away from that shot like he had committed murder. And it's a crazy thing to notice, this is how I'm programmed in basketball, there were 22 seconds left in the shot clock. So you're supposed to be throwing it out to the guard and he takes that shot. Oh! That's why he was doing that. While you were in the NBA, you overlapped with Kareem. I did, yes. By how much time was that? Well, I played five years. So I played from 79 through 84. So I played against him for my five years. Yeah, because he's active that whole time. Magic Johnson as well? Magic Johnson as well, yeah. So who's better? He was more of a contemporary. Who's better? Magic Johnson or Kareem Abdul-Jabbar? Two different positions. Oh, man. You knew he was going to give that answer. I know. I'll tell you something a lot of people don't think about. And I can say this from experience. When you're playing against these guys and they are so good, and being 6'5, I'm playing against guys 6'7, whatever, and you're taking your shot, if there's a thought in your mind that that shot can get blocked, what does it do to your confidence? You hesitate a split second and you're done. And it gets blocked. Exactly. So all the scientific gravity and everything you do doesn't commit to play. I don't get the shot off it. It's going behind me, right? But if you think about Kareem, this is why I give the advantages to the smaller guys, like the Michael Jordans of the world. Kareem is shooting that shot. Smaller than 6'6, or 6'5. Right. Exactly. And if you saw one of those. The little dudes. The little guys. The tiny guys. There was one piece where Kareem was shooting his skyhook, and he was speaking about it. That was Caldwell Jones for the 76ers, who was guarding him, who's a seven footer. Kareem had the hand way up here, and Caldwell, at seven feet, looked like he was about 5'5. So my point being that when you're shooting a shot, and you know it's not going to get blocked, you're going to be a whole lot better than the guy who's worried about getting his shot blocked. Well, I asked Kareem, because here's the leading scorer of the NBA, I asked him, at his peak, how would he do competing today? That's a fair question, but I guess check it out. I'd be able to play in today's game. I don't think somebody from the 30s could play in today's game. Okay, so you're near enough in the past to sort of figure out a way to get in there. Yeah, I could get in there. Because I still have skills that would translate today and be useful, scoring near the basket. Now, today, guys, your height are 60 pounds heavier than you were. But it wouldn't have been hard to just put more muscle on you today, and that's what they do. But I'd still be competitive today, because even though I didn't have that kind of muscle, my quickness and agility compensated. I don't think Kareem really understands that he's probably not like a little speedy guy. He thought he was fast. Yeah, but he's like seven feet. He's a giant. You can only be as fast as a seven-foot person can be, is what you're saying. Yeah, so I think he has a wrong self-perception, is what I'm saying. Because when you're seven feet, you move like this. Now, here's the thing. There's a physical limit to how fast really large things can be, okay? Because if I want to say, I want to scratch my head with my hand. If my hand is so long that the electromagnetic impulses take 10 seconds to get from the tip of my finger to my brain, I'll say, I want to scratch my head. My finger doesn't even get the signal till 10 seconds. And then I bring my hand up, scratch my head, and I'm good. Nerve impulses travel up to 286 miles per hour in the human body. It doesn't matter whether you're six foot three or seven foot three. Those impulses are going to move fast enough to make sure you can scratch your head. No, I got you. That's correct. Charles, Charles, I'm making a different point. No, I'm just making an astrophysical point. Can you have a life form the size of an entire galaxy? This is the point. These are serious questions when we search for life in the universe. And one of the constraints on that is it takes light 100,000 years to cross the galaxy. And that's the fastest thing we know. So a life form that's 100,000 light years across, if it wants to scratch its head, it can't do it any faster than it takes light to move 100,000 years. So it has to move slower. That's my point. No, I get it. So now with people, you're saying it moves fast enough, so seven footer, five footer shouldn't make much of a difference. Makes no difference whatsoever in the basketball court. A big man like Jim can move just as fast as a little man like me, possibly faster. Don't use this man as an example of how fast you could have moved. Were you as fast as the little guys? No. Exactly. But it's not because his nerves didn't have to travel faster or slower or longer. Then what's the reason? I was pigeon-toed, knock-kneed and slow. Basically, what Jim was saying was, look man, I was white. Coming up, we're going to talk about the physics of of snaring rebounds and sinking bank shots when Star Talk returns. To StarTalk, from the American Museum of Natural History, we're exploring the physics of basketball, featuring my interview with NBA All-Star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Check it out. A rebound in basketball, you have to get a sense of how the thing is going to bounce before the thing makes that bounce, so that you can be in the right place at the right time. What's going through your head? When you, how many rebounds, was it a billion? I think 17,000. 17,000 rebounds. The angle in equals the angle out. So if a shot comes from this angle at the basket, the probability is it's going to take the same angle coming off the other side. By the way, that's a law, it's a law of optics. The angle of incidence equals the angle of reflection. And it's like a mirror. So you have to understand the angle that's going to come off and then the distance from the rim and backboard that you need to be at to have the optimum opportunity to collect the rebound. Plus 101 inch wingspan. Well, it helps, but the ability to anticipate is... So we can spend 10 minutes, you telling me, I calculate the angle, but then really, I just reach out and grab the ball. No, some people just stand there, you got to move, but... So you were particularly potent because you basically combined your 100 inch wingspan with the knowledge of angle of incidence and angle of reflection. Right, and what we call hops. In my day, I don't know that I use that word, hops. Hops is, that's your vertical. Vertical? Yeah, basically like... Hang time, vertical? Yeah, yo, bro got hops, like, yeah, you can get up. That's when you play above the rim, you got hops, you know? He just told me a little bit about his game. Oh! You are in a leaper. No, no, I just did, when I grew up, we didn't have that word, we didn't use that word. But I could jump. I could dunk the ball in ninth grade. So you had hops, that's all there is to it, so, you know, yeah. I did not have hops. Yes. So do you think he got the rebounds because he's calculating angle of incidence and angle of reflection? Yes. Or because he has a 101 inch wingspan? Because you know what, here's the deal, I asked, while he said that, I asked for a... Where did you get this? I always carry it. Because I am that insecure. But no, seriously, check this out, check this out. Look at this. Look at this. This is a 101 inch wingspan. So, if a ball comes anywhere... Anywhere, anywhere... Well, that's arm to arm, so it would be half of that. There you go. Yes, exactly. Wait, sorry. Uh-oh. I just broke your arms. I broke... Oh, oh, snap. Straighten that out. Bring out the Viagra. Alright, so there you go. So, the rebound comes, his arm just wherever... Right. So, now, it's not just that, it's the full... You get a, like a circle out of that. That's right. Right. And this could be a new unit of measurement, the Kareems. Like, we are 6,000 Kareems from Midtown. So, how many Kareems to the moon? I'll work on that. I mean, Charles, we got like 238,000 times 5,280 divided by 101 times 12. That's right. 238,000 is the miles to the moon, and you divide that out by the feet in inches, and you do it. Right. Yeah. That's what I was thinking. So, Jim, it's both, I guess, right? I think size matters. I mean, obviously, if you're 7... Excuse me. If you're 7'2. You know, that's not what you want to say after I just put away a tape measure. But, yes, I mean, when you think about it, there's a lot of room for him just to be grabbing rebounds because he's Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, right? But if you think of guys like in the old days, Dennis Rodman, who was 6'8, one of the best rebounders, Charles Barkley, one of the best rebounders, Charles Barkley is about 6'6, if he's that. These guys understood positioning. I was going to say that's because rebound is about positioning. And the other thing in terms of watching the basketball, where it's going to hit, if you watch a typical game, it's about, and don't quote me totally on this, but if you shoot the ball from the left side of the floor and you miss your shot about 70-ish percent at a time, where's that ball going to end up going? It's going to go to the right side of the floor. So if I'm a rebounder and I'm thinking about rebounding and I'm in the middle of the floor and a shot's coming from the left wing… You quickly run to the other side of the… Just to play the odds. Right, right. Right? It's all physics. It really is. So there's not just the rebound. I asked Kareem about the bank shot, because in my day, we took bank shots. They had a pretty high percentage. Now you never see bank shots at all. I just asked him about this. Check it out. I've done some math on the backboard, and there are many trajectories bouncing off the backboard that get it into the basket, more so than just going straight for the basket. And so it almost feels like anyone hitting the ball off the backboard, that that's a lesser shot, even though it counts the same on the scoreboard. Do you feel like that's going on out there? Making bank shots can be very difficult, you know. So there are certain times when it helps you because it raises the target. When you're shooting it off the backboard, it raises the target, so it makes it more difficult to block that shot. Oh, I hadn't thought about that. So the fact that you hit the backboard first, and the backboard is higher than the rim, meant the shot went higher to begin with. It went higher to begin with, and it avoids the arc of the defender's reach. So Jim, can you think of an optimum angle for a bank shot? Because when I'm shooting crumbled paper into the office trash, if the trash is in the corner, I'm making it every time off the wall, right? And so I'm thinking, why aren't more people shooting bank shots today? Some of them are. Some of them do shoot it. The guy with the nets, Brook Lopez, for example, a seven footer, has a great bank shot, and he can shoot it from 15 feet, 18 feet, almost to the three point line, efficiently. I think where it's become a lost art, though, is when we were playing the game, we were putting the ball on the floor, dribble, dribble, dribble, and you go to the angles, right? An extended layup, if you will. That's the best angle to shoot a bank shot. But we were putting the ball on the floor to go by people. The three-point shot didn't exist, so you had to understand that, OK, now I have this old-fashioned pull-up jump shot, the mid-range game. That's kind of a lost art. And that's where the bank shot comes into play, I think, a lot. So because I keep thinking, once you're the same point about the cross-sectional area, a bank shot, just like you said, you're coming in higher above the rim. And so you do these measurements. And the great thing about a bank shot, it's like pool. If you hit that spot, it's going to go in. That's all there is to it. If you hit the spot on the backboard, it's going to go in. Did you play in Philly? Oh, you know I did. No, I don't know you did. Oh, let me tell you something. No, I don't know you did. Oh, yes, I did. No, I don't know if you did. This is called a hand check. Now, he's a much larger player, OK? So what I want to do is I want to put my leg on him. I want to hand check him right here, OK? Now, we have an actual basketball player here. Jim, come on. Jim, Jim, come on. I am going to watch my hamstrings. So how much were you body checked? I mean, what could you get away with? Well, you can get away with all of that. Really? But then it becomes everybody thinks that it's about the upper body. So I want to just keep my legs bent a little bit. So now I can move here. He's not playing. Chuck can help me double-team. Right. So this is the double-team. Yeah, like this, like this. Anyway, so now, no, seriously, so now, this is what we call the schoolyard sexual defense. What you do is you make a guy very uncomfortable. You get up with him like this, and you go, so you like that? It's in your color. So what was your best shot? What was your best shot? Um, I could shoot a jump shot pretty well. One hand, like, what was the set shot that you used to do? No, not the set shot. So Charles, what was your best shot? The free throw. Coming up, NBA legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar reveals his true dream when StarTalk returns. And Jim, thanks for coming. All right. Welcome back to StarTalk to feature my interview with NBA all-time leading scorer Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. And he has had some memorable pop culture cameos. Here he is taking on Bruce Lee in Game of Death. Yes. Whoa. Love that. And of course, his role in that over-the-top comedy. Airplane. Airplane. So I had to ask him, what would his dream cameo role be? Check it out. I always wanted to be in Star Wars and be one of some kind of creatures that, you know, like Chewbacca, I mean, that should have been my role. Is this on your tombstone? I always wanted to beat Chewbacca. Forget the basketball. Forget the... I'm sorry. Wow. You know, that may explain why every time he dunked the basketball, he went, the... Oh. So Charles, what is the Wookie planet like? The Wookie home planet is a forested world. Does it have normal gravity? Yes. Except it's slightly stronger than that of Earth, which is why the Wookies evolved to be larger and stronger. OK, so but basketball, if the gravity is about the same, basketball would not be much different. Absolutely identical. Yeah. I would say probably the Wookies used a heavier ball because they're so much stronger than humans. But as well you know, there is this thing we call the Copernican principle, which suggests that the laws of physics here on Earth are the same anywhere else in the universe. And therefore, if they were playing round ball in the Wookie home world somewhere, I'm sure Chewbacca would have to box out just like Kareem did back in the day. This is the Copernican principle of basketball. Well, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar had a question for me about space and the universe itself. Here's Kareem's Cosmic Query. Check it out. Why do all the planets circle the sun on the same plane? It's not only that. They also go in the same direction around the sun, not only the same plane, but the same direction. And this question came up in the 1700s and Immanuel Kant, great philosopher, posed that question and then he posed an answer for it. And it turned out to be correct. So, you have a gas cloud from which all of this formed. And we know this because you can look out in the galaxy and you see these pockets of gas forming things within them. So, the gas cloud is usually very big and diffuse. When it's that diffuse, it's not forming anything. It's got to get a little more concentrated. Its internal gravity pulls it in. And in the center, you're going to form the star. In the surroundings, you can still have pockets of condensation, but they're not going to form the star. They're going to form like lower mass objects like planets. But as this thing collapses, it actually spins faster and faster. It's no different from an ice skater that has extended arms. You bring them in, and then they start spinning faster and faster. So as this spins faster and faster, the midplane cannot continue to collapse inside because the centrifugal forces are preventing it. Whereas top and bottom, not a problem. It just collapses. But at the midplane, it tries to collapse, and it can't, and it maintains an orbit around it. So everything that collapsed is in a flattened disk in orbit in the same direction around the host star. So good question. Thank you. So he's thinking about this. The dude is thinking about this. So the spinning cloud, if this were an astrophysical cloud, this may be the first time a basketball has ever been referenced this way. I'm thinking in all the universe. So you have a spinning gas cloud, but it's spinning like with an axis basically. And so it can collapse top to bottom, but it just can't collapse inward. And so the whole thing ends up flat. That's all there is to it. And you got a flattened system. So our entire galaxy is flat. So we've got supermassive black hole in the middle, star systems in orbit around it, everybody's orbiting in the same direction, and our galaxy is so flat, it is flatter than a flapjack. Flatter than a flapjack. Yeah, it's more like a crepe, actually. The ratio between the thickness and the width is about 100 to 1. 100 to 1. So if you have a super thin crust pizza that's like a third of an inch thick, then your pizza would have to be 35 inches across. Yeah. Coming up, NBA great Kareem Abdul-Jabbar dropped some wisdom about the value of sports when StarTalk returns. Welcome back to StarTalk from the American Museum of Natural History. We're featuring my interview with one of the sport's all-time greats, NBA superstar, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. And Kareem also deeply values science and society, and he's helping to share some of that outlook with the next generation. Check it out. I have a foundation that promotes STEM education. Oh. So it's called Camp Skyhook. We send kids to a camp, and they do STEM experiments. Observing the night sky, there's animals up there, there's streams and everything. They check out the watershed, and do different things related to science, technology, engineering, and math. And we do this so that they have an idea of where the good jobs are gonna be in the 21st century. So Charles, did you hear what the mission statement is? No, what? The mission statement is give kids a shot that can't be blocked. That's perfect. All I know is with that mission statement, there's at least one kid at Camp Skyhook who is very disappointed that he is not at a basketball camp. I can't believe I'm going to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's Skyhook camp, and it's just math class. But the point that we talked about earlier in the show is that what Kareem is saying with Camp Skyhook and other projects like this is that math and science can be just as beautiful as a beautiful basketball game. Well, we've been breaking down the science of basketball tonight, but of course, sports is much more than just the physics of the game. And so I asked Kareem about the true value of sports. Check it out. Would you have any regrets if professional sports became all about the science and less about the personal drive? Well, I think sports teaches young people a lot of social skills that are really valuable. Leadership skills, conflict resolution, the discipline. So I think there's a lot there in sports that has value. Also knowing how to fail. Yeah, and then come back, dealing with it. Dealing with failure and improving and coming back and doing it right the next time. Yeah, not only how to win, but how to fail. That happens in science too. For every great discovery, there are hundreds of failures. And the press never talks about those. No, but that's okay. With any kind of endeavor, there is success and there's failure. Perhaps in sports, it might be the best way to convey to people that it's really okay to fail because that's not actually failure. When I think about Kareem, I think about, yes, we have a scholar, we have an athlete, not just an ordinary athlete, one of the greatest there ever was, and what happens in school? Well, you take a class on this topic, and then a class on that topic, and then a class on this other topic, and there's a book, and all of our educational trajectory is stove-piped, and you gotta go into a stove-pipe to learn that this is biology. Oh, but it's not, it's that, but not this other thing. And nature and the world does not divide itself up that way. There's no understanding of biology without chemistry. And there's no understanding of chemistry without physics. And physics manifests in all of these sports. So for people to say, I wanna learn this, but I don't wanna learn that, they are compartmentalizing their knowledge and their access to what nature actually is. So for me, learning about as much as you possibly can empowers you to find cross-pollinated connections that maybe someone else never even dreamt of. Where in the case of Kareem Jabbar, it improved his game because he knew a little bit of physics. So for me, as an academic, it's not about being pigeonholed. It's about how much of this world you can consume. And what comes out the other side is brand new insights into how this world works. And you can only be a better person, a better competitor, a better lover, a better citizen, a better member of your species for having done so. You had me at lover. And that is the Cosmic Perspective. You've been watching Star Talk. And as always, I bid you to keep looking up.