Things You Thought You Knew – Kicked into Orbit

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Okay, so the high wire, the reason why they carry this big stick that’s left and right, okay?

It’s not to balance them.

No.

It’s not what it’s doing.

Really?

No.

No.

Now you’ve got me.

Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.

StarTalk begins right now.

Gary, what are you gonna line up today?

Right, so we’ve had some questions and one of them landed right in my backyard.

It’s how hard would you have to kick a soccer ball or if you want a football, to get it into orbit now?

Okay.

People are dreaming, people dream in superpowers on this one.

Aren’t they just?

So now, just so as you understand here on Planet Earth, the highest recorded kick in the professional game, and this might surprise people, 131 miles per hour.

So, okay, I didn’t see that coming.

I didn’t see that coming.

I did the goalkeeper.

Gone in an instant.

And who did it kill?

I don’t know.

Nobody.

This record is owned by…

It was like a bowling ball, knocked everybody down.

Yeah, no surprise.

This is a Brazilian guy called Ronnie Heberson.

And he’s done it a couple of times.

He wasn’t a one and done on this sort of speed.

So he’s got previous for it.

So it’s interesting that the design of the new balls has enabled them to travel faster, which is speeding the game up.

It’s exactly what everyone was after.

What I wonder is, because I don’t study soccer balls.

I know it’s a big deal before every World Cup.

But the amount that the ball compresses, so that when it’s coming off your foot, there’s not only the speed of your foot that’s translated to the ball, there’s the recoil of the ball off your toe for you having compressed it.

Yeah, there’s the deformation and then the…

The deformation, but it’s not just the deformation because you can deform something that doesn’t bounce back and then it’s no good, right?

It’s got to have that sort of…

That’s the Tempur-Pedic ball.

What the fuck is he saying?

Memory, memory ball.

That would be a really comfortable soccer.

Very comfortable, very comfortable, slow game.

It wraps your toes and your toes don’t want to leave it.

Yeah, exactly.

But no, it’s interesting because you’re now starting to roll this out.

Is it an American football you want to kick into orbit?

Do you want to go away from inflated balls and then get, you know, what’s it going to take to get a baseball into space, a golf ball into space?

You know, where does your mind take you as to the sort of projectile aspect of it?

But I was surprised because I didn’t think the top speed of a soccer ball would be anywhere near 130 miles an hour.

Yeah, neither did I.

Plus, when I played Little League, and I have to think about why this is true, but I could always hit a Spalding pink ball way farther than a baseball.

And that’s obviously an air-filled ball that responds quickly.

But I also unraveled the baseball.

Have you ever done that?

Maybe not you, Gary.

No, not lately.

No, American.

Chuck, have you ever done that?

Yeah, by mistake, I hit one so hard.

You know, I think they call it tearing the cover off the ball.

I think that’s what they refer to it as.

Does anyone?

Then you woke up, and then what happened?

This sounds an awful lot like a Robert Redford movie.

Yeah, yeah, I saw that movie.

Yeah, so you unstitch it and remove the leather, and then there’s basically rubber bands that are just, it’s a continuous sort of rubber, it’s like rubber bands, and you keep doing that, and then there’s this like little string.

Yeah, it’s basically stringy rubber, and then there’s a little pink ball, last I did this, I don’t know if it’s different today, little pink ball, and my pink ball had liquid in it, and I thought, what?

What’s up with that?

It’s like the size of a marble, a little bigger than a marble in the middle.

A little mini planet in the middle, a little magma, right in the center.

It’s the core.

We reached the core of the baseball.

Okay, so here’s the thing.

So you want to know a cool fact?

Please.

It’s a cool, stupid, geeky fact, all right?

The escape velocity for any object.

So for Earth, it’s seven miles per second.

That’s a lot.

That’s a lot more than 131 miles per second.

So he ain’t kicking it in an orbit.

Here.

Yeah.

I was going to say, maybe Superman could kick a ball that hard, you know?

So here’s…

Oh, by the way, so it’s not a matter of strength, okay?

It’s a matter of speed of your foot.

So Superman is strong, but is he fast?

Now you can catch a speeding bullet.

He can catch a bullet, I guess.

Exactly.

That’s pretty fast.

He’s very fast.

He’s not flash fast.

No, no, he’s not.

Right, right.

He’s probably the second thing after flash.

And he has super everything that’s human, which we once discussed, Chuck.

We discussed his flatulence.

We concluded he must also have super flatulence.

But you have to dig that one out of our archives.

That’s on YouTube.

Yes.

Super flatulence.

By the way, he wouldn’t be the only one.

Not that I’m bragging.

Here’s an interesting fact.

So you take the escape velocity for a planet, okay, and divide it by the square root of two.

And that’s the speed you need to get into orbit.

It’s kind of a cool fact.

So okay.

So, so what is seven divided by square root of two?

I’ll do that right now.

Yeah, you do.

Seven divided by square root of two.

You get five.

So the space station and the space shuttle and Elon Musk and all these folks orbit the earth at five miles per second.

Right.

So that’s lower than the escape velocity, obviously, because you’re still in orbit.

But escape velocity and orbital speed, low orbital speed, are precisely related by that formula, but in fact, the derivation of that was on my general exam for graduate school.

You can derive how and why that’s true.

Straightforward, but you have to know that that’s a thing, all right, and then figure out how to do it.

Anyhow.

Anyhow.

Point is, 130 miles an hour, it ain’t happening on earth.

So where was it going to happen?

So I take my ball and I go off, off world, you know, where am I going to go to get myself my jollies about kicking the ball into deep space?

Okay.

So, so Mars is not going to work.

You’re not fast enough for Mars.

You’re not even fast enough for Pluto.

Crushing my dreams here, Neil.

You’re not fast enough even for the largest asteroid is Ceres.

In fact, Ceres is so long, C-E-R-E-S, from the root of Cereal comes from that, by the way.

Ceres was the goddess Parvus, I think, one of these farm goddesses.

And we get Cereal from that root word.

So point is, Ceres is so large as an asteroid that its own gravity shaped it into a sphere.

And after the Pluto debacle…

Oh, we’re not going there again, are we?

No we’re not.

But round things too small to be planets are called dwarf planets.

Pluto got demoted from planet to dwarf planet status.

And Ceres, which was in the ranks of asteroids, got promoted from asteroid to dwarf planet.

So on Pluto and Ceres, the escape velocity is about…

What do we get?

About a third of a mile an hour.

I can do that.

No, no, sorry, sorry.

Mile per second.

Excuse me.

Third of a mile per second?

Yeah, you ain’t getting…

Not happening.

No, that’s nowhere.

You’re not happening.

Right, right.

So, these are big objects.

These are, you know…

Yeah.

They’re hundreds of miles across, these objects, okay?

So the question is, what size object can we satisfy Gary’s Superman urges?

So let’s look at big comets.

So Haley’s Comet, not as big as they come, but it’s, you know, we’ve all heard of it and it’s visible.

So, okay, that one, it’s like half a mile an hour.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Oh, we could do that.

No, but then how are you going to play the game at all?

Oh, no, with a bead.

I’m going to take some charms.

I’m going to get some charms.

We’re all going to go up.

We’re going to kick balls from one asteroid to another.

Just don’t chase after the balls.

It would be like golf, you’re going to land it on another asteroid.

Oh, okay.

And then, but then you, okay.

So we can all run at least one mile per hour.

So if you run too fast, you can jump yourself into orbit and to escape velocity.

So you’re right, Gary.

You’d have to get a configuration of asteroids and comets.

And again, all of these are 10, you know, two dozen miles across around there.

Practically anything we throw as humans or kick would achieve escape velocity.

So we need to wait for one of those meteor showers.

We’re going to get any joy out of that?

They’re percids, we can kick between them.

No, no, the meteor showers are tiny.

They’re like the size of peas.

Let’s not do that.

No, no, no.

Excuse me.

Excuse me.

The comets we’re talking about at 10-20 miles across, the asteroid that took out the dinosaurs was 6 miles across.

Ow.

Yeah.

Okay.

You don’t want these.

This is not what’s falling in a meteor shower.

No.

If comets and asteroids are these large.

Not even Bruce Willis could help us.

Exactly.

If they were what were falling in a meteor shower, that’s the end of all life on earth.

Yeah.

Let’s not do that.

Yes.

Let’s not do that.

Right.

So, yeah.

But it made for one hell of a soccer game.

So going from a few dozen miles up to like a few hundred miles is a very big difference in escape velocity for us.

And you’re right.

Superman could do it at all times.

Oh, and by the way, that old adage, what goes up must come down, you know, that grandma said or everybody else.

That’s only true if what you throw up does not achieve escape velocity.

If it goes higher than seven miles per second on Earth, it will never come back to Earth.

It’ll stay in the solar system, but it’ll never come back to Earth.

Now if you wanted to leave the solar system, what you do is you say, what’s Earth’s speed at our orbital speed at our distance from the sun?

Right.

If I take that speed, which is 30 kilometers a second, okay, but 18 miles per second multiplied by the square root of 2, I’ll get the escape velocity from the sun at Earth’s location.

So, it works beautifully this way.

So if you want to throw something that not only never comes back to Earth, but also leaves the solar system, you take the 30 kilometers a second multiplied by square root of 2, which is 1.4, so that’s like 400, it’s like 4, what is it, 30, 1.4, 45 kilometers per second.

That comes out to be about 30 miles per second.

If you get 30 miles per second, like straight out, it’s gone.

You’re gone.

You’re gone.

So we’re going to need that equation.

That’s mathematics.

When we decide that we’re going to bug out of this particular solar system.

Oh, you have plans.

Yeah.

Of course, we have plans.

So that’s the only way I can help you here, Gary.

We are not physically able to achieve this.

Correct.

Thank God.

Thank God.

Because it’d be the worst damn soccer game you’ve ever seen.

If someone gets angry and they kick it in the orbit.

Kick the ball and it’s just, there you go.

Can you imagine?

You go home and your father’s sitting there and says, where’s your ball?

John kicked it into space.

The bully.

The soccer bully.

You go and get that ball right now.

I haven’t spent my…

It would just be chaos.

Oh, here’s an interesting fact.

If you don’t achieve escape velocity, the ball will want to return to the spot where you kicked it.

In an orbit.

The problem is, Earth is in the way.

So, if you shrunk Earth down to a point, but you still floated up there and kicked the ball and you didn’t quite achieve escape velocity, it will make this huge elongated orbit come around and then hit you upside to back it ahead.

But right now, Earth is in the way.

It’s going to hit Earth on the other side of the Earth.

So the interesting thing about orbits, the point you launch it is a permanent spot of the orbital path of the object itself.

So basically, boomerang, soccerang.

Yeah, soccerang.

Yeah, soccerang.

Yeah, and an hour and a half later, it will hit you right upside to back it ahead.

Now that right there is a great prank where you kick the ball and then you just go, stand right there, don’t move.

Just wait for it.

Wait for it, bro.

We need some patience, but it would be a giggle.

Alright, so Gary, that’s all I can do for you here.

That’s more than enough, Neil, thank you.

Okay, you got it.

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Thank Okay, so what do you got?

All right, this, I suppose really, this is human nature.

Who’s the better pop band, the Beatles or the Rolling Stones?

Everyone has this kind of question, and they want to sort of get them on together.

Now, here we go, in a sporting reference, is cricket, the sport of cricket, harder or easier than baseball?

It doesn’t make a difference, they both suck.

What?

There’s your answer.

Chuck, for his nuanced point of view on the world.

There you go.

You know, I’m trying to be as subtle as possible.

And you achieved it.

You achieved your aim.

Chuck, you gotta admit that without Gary on the show, cricket would never come out of our mouths at all.

This is true.

You know, he rounds us, he completes us.

This is true.

All right, so let’s back up here.

All right, let me tell you, Gary, let me tell you the little bit of cricket that I know.

Okay.

So I played Little League Baseball.

I was catcher on the team.

Our teams were the named after real teams.

So I was on the Red Sox and I was catcher.

How did that go down with the boy from the Bronx?

It was not a problem.

Yeah, the Red Sox hate the Yankees, but the Yankees really don’t care.

Yeah, and that’s how you know the Yankees are better.

That’s how you know the Yankees are better than the Red Sox because you go up to a certain part of the Northeast and I don’t care what happens, it’s Yankees suck, Yankees suck.

But you walk around New York and you never hear one word about the Red Sox, ever.

Do you remember when the Patriots won the Super Bowl and there’s a Patriots parade?

Yep.

This is in February and this crowd, this is in Boston, and the crowd spontaneously started saying, Yankees suck, Yankees suck, at a completely different sport, at a completely different season.

And they’re celebrating the world champion win.

But they couldn’t resist saying Yankees suck.

Right, so I had no problems wearing a Red Sox uniform.

I was also an All-Star.

Of course.

And so I was all these things, okay?

I just happened to be all these things.

So I visit England for the first time and I see them playing cricket.

And I’m observing.

And I’m thinking, wait, the ball here.

Oh damn, boy, y’all play baseball wrong.

The hell you doing out there?

Now why there’s some damn sticks in the middle of the field?

Now you know somebody gonna fall.

You got yourself a liability right there, son.

That’s what we’re looking at.

That’s a wicket.

That Chuck, those three stumps in the ground with the little bits of wood on the top are the wickets.

You have one at each end.

They are 22 yards apart.

In America, we call that a lawsuit.

Put that on the playground.

Tell you right now, you’re gonna have four or five parents suing your ass in a minute.

Anyway, are the wickets like bases?

Well, let me get there.

Hold on.

Yeah, yeah, it is.

So, I’m there and what am I, 14 or something, something.

I also played stick ball in the Bronx.

All right.

All right.

That’s a game.

That’s a game.

Now you’re talking.

Okay.

Got out the broomstick and the rich kid had an actual stick ball stick that he bought.

And it looked a lot like my broomstick, but just didn’t have the threading at the bottom of the thing.

You know what we did with that?

We took it and we beat that rich kid with it, because how dare you actually bring anything other than a mop or a broomstick to this game?

Chuck, I thought your anger management sessions were going well.

What is happening?

We are the anger management sessions.

Oh, we are.

So I’m looking at it and I said, can I try?

All right.

And so the bat is like twice the size of a baseball bat.

And it’s flat.

On one side, it’s the face is flat, but it’s got depth behind it.

Okay, but I’m saying I’m hitting a ball bigger than a baseball.

With a bat bigger than a baseball bat, it’s at least twice the size.

And it’s flat.

And I said…

You know what we call that?

We call that cheating.

So I get up there and they pitch the ball.

Is that the right word?

It’s a bowl.

It’s a bowl, yeah.

And it comes off.

They go into the ground and come off.

And I swap the hell out of the ball.

And the ball goes way…

And I don’t know the point of the game, but I knew if I had to hit it far, I hit that sucker far.

And what I didn’t do right was I ran down to wherever I was supposed to run, but I dropped the bat.

Ah.

Wait a minute.

You’ve got to carry your bat, Chuck.

You were not allowed to drop the bat in cricket.

You have to carry your bat.

You run to the other wicket, which, as I said, is 22 yards away.

And if you hit it far…

I mean, you have to treat a cricket ball a bit like a baseball, as if you’ve got an allergy to leather.

As soon as it comes near, you smash it as far away as possible.

Now if you hit it over the boundary, you get six runs.

If you hit it and it bounces before the boundary and goes out, that’s four runs.

Now that stops you having to run four times between the wickets.

So it’s just an easy way to get your runs up.

So I can stay at bat, correct?

Yeah, if you hit it over the boundary.

I hit it over the outer thing, but I just stayed there and I hit it again.

And then I had another time, I think this bounced, but then they caught it after the bounce.

But then I run, right?

That’s when I ran.

I’m trying to remember the details of this.

If it bounces and someone catches it, you still have to then get your runs in.

Correct.

There’s no way this game could be played in Philly, because nobody is going to allow you to hold on to the bat while you run to any place.

No, the cops will pick you up.

That’s a recipe for disaster.

No, cops will pick you up, depending on your skin color.

If you run it with a bat, yeah, run it as fast as you can with a bat.

And Neil, you’re dressed all in white, right?

Because cricket, the traditional uniform of a cricket player is all white.

So, no forward face stealing of a base, right?

No sliding, no nothing.

You’ll sell your clothes.

The elite bowlers, and there’s all different types of…

Just like in baseball, you have someone who’s a specialist as a slider, curveball, someone’s got three-digit speed, and cricket has the same.

Although what they’re doing is they’re bowling into the ground and a certain length of bowl allows the batsman to work or not work.

So the top speed will be just over a hundred miles per hour.

So they’re spinning the ball, so it hits the ground, then the friction between the spinning and the ground will have it…

Exactly, but then the condition of the ground is a big difference.

Because if it’s grassy, you’ve got moisture in the grass, and therefore it’s going to have less abrasion, less friction.

It’s going to eat some of the momentum of the ball.

And then the slower bowlers will hold the ball in a certain way.

Because the seam on a cricket ball is a…

If you imagine two semicircles brought together is a raised seam.

It’s an equator.

It’s an equator, but it’s raised.

So you work across the seam, the seam changes angle, and the bowler will…

If they’re really talented spin bowlers, they will bowl it out the back of their hand, not forward down the seam.

So there really is a talent.

And the slower spin bowlers, it will come to you coming from right to left.

And then when it hits the ground, it will almost do a 45-degree cut across you and confuse the hell out of you.

If they spin it really, really fast.

Absolutely.

And there are some real spin demons out there.

They’re so talented.

Okay, let me just say, none of them confused me.

Whatever they were doing.

Neil, you’re an all-star.

Maybe they’re not skilled bowlers.

They were not skilled bowlers, maybe.

I am confused as to how anybody can watch this.

Because what the hell are we talking about?

I’ve got something that’s going to fascinate you.

If you have an international game, say for instance, India played England cricket.

That would be an international game.

I know it’s the number one sport in India.

It is absolutely off the chart when you see how they absorbed the game.

Plus, if I were from India, remembering the history with England, I’d want to beat your ass every single time.

And by the way, by the way, speaking of the history of England and India, there’s no way I would play a game where an Indian guy could run at me with a bat.

If you’re British.

No, it’s not the bat.

It’s not the bat.

It’s all of a sudden someone who has the ability to bowl at you at a hundred miles an hour.

And if they bowl at a certain length and they bowl short, that ball hits the ground, obviously, but comes up round about head high.

It could hit you.

Yeah.

Oh, so you’re allowed to hit somebody.

Yeah.

Well, they’re going to wear a helmet, but you get body line technique.

So the aim and it will pitch up round here and you find batsmen will duck and all the rest of it.

So the amazing thing is what goes on in the science of how they will shine one side of the ball, leaving the other side of the ball in a mat.

So that then enhances Magnus effect.

Well, that makes sense.

There’s all sorts of things going on within the game.

I would say the Magnus effect in that case, because the ball is not even symmetric in what is smooth and what is not, then it could end up quark screwing, perhaps, depending on which way it’s spinning.

So it’s not always curving in one direction, but it could actually take on another kind of path that you can’t foresee, unless you have really good vision watching the thing spin.

So, let me ask, with the bat, I use the flat side, but can you use the other side, which is angled?

They do.

So when you get a really, really clever spin bowler, that ball’s coming in maybe 40 miles an hour, maybe even slightly slower.

And what they do is they reverse sweep, so they go from their right hand side, and as they know that ball is going to cut across them going left, they will reverse sweep that out away, so they’ll use the backside of the bat.

I’ve seen that.

So Chuck, as I was saying, with an international game, say India versus England, it’s a test match.

That’s what they’re called.

And this will turn you off cricket for life.

It can take four days to complete.

A game?

Yes.

Yeah.

Okay.

Because it was slower than baseball.

Yeah.

So the thing, this is so, it’s where kind of baseball gets all the statistical, patient, deep thinking.

This is where cricket has such an audience for some people around the world that absolutely adore it.

Plus the fact they get to bowl balls at England at 100 miles an hour.

Perfect.

Yeah.

So the audacity of England to play any sport against a former colony.

I just want to put that out there.

I know.

There’s a lot of scratching of head and thinking, oh gosh.

I’m just putting it out there.

You know what?

See, the thing is when you face a pace bowler, someone who has got triple digit speed, it’s not just your ability to be a good batsman.

It’s a test of your courage.

This thing is coming at you at a rate of knots that is frightening.

All right.

Thank you, Gary.

I didn’t know about all the spinning of the ball.

It’s a really fascinating sport.

I didn’t pay close enough attention to know that half was shiny, the other half wasn’t.

So I was good at hitting it.

After that, they could probably figure me out and just pitch around me or something.

There’s some finessing with carrying the bat, getting used to that.

But when you get a good bowler, they’ll work out.

Because they won’t just do one type of bowl at you.

They’ll come at you with a whole variety just to keep you going.

And they’ll find out what your kryptonite is.

And then they’ll hit the stumps.

And listen, I don’t want to offend anybody who loves cricket, but any sport that makes baseball look exciting might want to be reconsidered is all I’m saying.

But you don’t want to offend anybody, right?

I don’t.

Anytime someone says, I don’t want to offend anybody, they’re going to offend somebody.

Okay, so the test matches can take four days long.

I don’t mean to sound racist, but…

I don’t mean to sound sexist.

There are different formats of cricket, like T20 or the IPL, the Indian Premier League, which are short format, 20 overs each, and each over is six bowls, and they’re done in a couple of hours, and it is along the lines of baseball.

There’s loads of razzmatazz, there’s loads of colored uniforms, and the game is all about hitting that ball as far away as possible.

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Gary, you mentioned something about motorcycles the other day, what was your issue?

Why motorcycles can stand up?

They’re transformers, that’s why.

Next question.

When you say stand up, not after you put up the kickstand, you mean it can just roll on its own without anybody on it.

In a vertical plane.

Or a person can stand on the seat while the thing is rolling.

For example, I’ve seen that, right?

The display bike teams, they’re fantastic.

Yeah, so for the longest while, and I count myself among those who would give the answer, that you have spinning wheels that are basically gyroscopes, and that they gyroscopically stabilize the motorcycle.

By the way, this same would apply to bicycles, of course.

Because in fact, there was a famous scene and famous because the people talked about it.

I thought it was clear and present, but I didn’t realize how many people didn’t know that if you set a bicycle moving down a hill with nobody on it, you’ll just keep rolling.

And it’ll keep going until it hits something.

Until it hits something for a long time, longer than you would expect.

And that was revealed in the movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

Yes.

In one of the romantic scenes with Robert Redford and Catherine Ross, I think it was.

It was also revealed in my driveway as a kid.

And I got into a hell of a lot of trouble.

Because, boy, do you know how much that bike cost?

I cannot believe that you were throwing that bike down.

What?

Well, that’s what you see.

You run and you just let the bike go.

And then it becomes a ghost bike.

So that was a common explanation.

And I’ve even given that explanation.

But I recently read that someone did an experiment where they added wheels that spin the opposite way of the wheels.

They’re not connected to the ground or anything, but they spin in the opposite direction, which cancels out the physical angular momentum of the rotating wheel.

So that the whole system no longer has a net gyroscopic force operating on it.

Interesting.

And it’s still stayed up as it went down.

So it’s like it’s rolling down the hill, but then let’s say you have like a balancing pole with two wheels on it, and then they’re spinning in the opposite direction.

Correct.

And they figured out a way to do this so that then there’s no net gyroscopic stabilizing force because it’s been canceled out just through the laws of physics.

So it’s still maintained its course.

And so here’s what’s going on, and it’s fascinating.

It’s more complicated with a bicycle than in other examples I could give, but a system is stable in whatever it’s doing if its center of mass is as low as it could be, okay?

Within a range of moves.

Which is the whole deal with motorsport, where they’re always trying to get the center of mass as low as possible.

Yes, and electric cars put their batteries, not on the roof, but as low as possible on the bottom.

Because watch what happened.

If the center of mass is so low that anything you do to that object raises the center of mass, it doesn’t want to do it.

It always wants to bring the center of mass as close to the center of the earth as possible.

That’s why, you guys remember weebles?

Chuck, do you remember weebles?

Weebles wobble, but they don’t fall down.

All together now.

So there they go.

So you push them and then it writes itself back up.

Well, what’s happening?

Because in its righted position, the center of mass is as low as it possibly can be.

And if you do anything else with a weeble, you are raising the center of mass.

And that’s not what the weeble wants to do relative to Earth.

So once you’ve raised the center of mass, it says, I’m going back to where I was, and the center of mass drops down, it gets closer to the center of the Earth.

In that case, only by a few inches, but it’ll do it.

It’s the same reason why boxes need boxes of cereal boxes need that that caution.

It says, when you open it, notice there might be some settling of contents.

We call it settling of contents.

But what’s actually happening is every cereal flake wants to get as close to the center of the Earth as it can.

That’s this job in life.

And so that’s why if you jiggle it, it doesn’t puff up.

If you jiggle it, everybody’s jockeying to get as low as it can inside the box to get as close to the center of mass as possible.

So it turns out the design of a bicycle where the center of mass of the front section and the back and the chair is that if you set the thing rolling down the hill and it begins to lean, what will happen is the front wheel will turn into that lean and right itself.

So the bike won’t necessarily go in a straight line, but if it curves, its tendency will be to right itself.

So, Neil, I’m on a higher wire on my bike because I’m a bit like that, and I’ve got this enormous big pole.

Why, why, why?

You want to ride a bicycle on a high wire?

Let’s just do the high wire first, and then we can stick you on a bike if you want.

Okay, so the high wire, the reason why they carry this big stick that’s left and right, okay?

It’s not to balance them.

No?

That’s not what it’s doing.

Really?

No.

Okay, now you’ve got me.

That balance pole is floppy.

Have you noticed that?

It’s not a rigid pole.

Chuck, I so thought you were going to drop a gag there.

I was going to say it happens to a lot of high wire watchers, but it’s okay.

Of course not.

I’m going to leave it alone.

Okay, so it’s not a rigid pole, because you could say you can use that to balance.

No, because they’re not using it to balance.

They get a floppy pole, so that the side on the left flops downward, and the side on the right flops downward.

Okay, and the system, the high wire walker plus the pole, has a center of mass now that is so low that if he starts tipping to the left, the center of mass is raised, because the pole is out there counterbalancing him.

Okay, so yes, I’ll use the word balance in that context, but it’s all about the center of mass.

If he tips, the center of mass raises, and it wants to lower the center of mass once again.

So he can easily, I mean, if you still have the talent to do this, stay on the pole, on the wire, because the pole plus the wire, him on the wire, is the lowest center of mass of the system that you can get.

And if you don’t see him walking with this up over his head, do you?

You don’t see that.

Okay, he’s holding it down low.

It’s always held pretty low right down by the waist.

Right by the waist, correct.

The whole thing is that we’re talking center of mass, always to keep this thing upright, to keep it in a good place.

So, Gary, now you want to have the high wire act on a motorcycle.

On a bike, let’s not go too bad.

Okay, so there’s probably some kind of groove in the tire for it to stay on the wire.

Well, you may take the tire off and use the rim.

Oh, that would work, for sure, because the rim is concave.

So that’s an interesting way to make that work.

But if you are up above the wire relative to the tires, you’d want the floppy stick, what do they call it?

You’d want that to go even wider out to the sides and be even more droopy.

And that would give you tremendous stability in doing this exercise.

So Gary, I don’t know, did I go where I had to go in that answer for you?

I think you did, yeah.

I mean, just thinking about, would it work then for electric motorbikes?

Because there’s no engine, and generally the engine is the lower part of the whole thing.

Oh, oh, oh.

Would that then work in the same way?

Because I’ve seen motorbikes where the batteries go up one of the…

Yeah, I was going to say, the difference is that the weight of an engine on a bike is pretty evenly distributed so that it makes the bike balanced to ride.

So once you just…

It’s between the rear wheel and where your feet go.

It’s not up in the front wheel.

Right.

So that’s normally the way they position engines, but for a battery, you can see it like they sit right under the front fork sometimes, and then sometimes at the bottom of the bike.

So it’s interesting.

I’d have to conclude, Gary, that if they’re putting batteries up the down tube, up the tubes, then that’s changing where the center mass of the system is.

And it can only be less stable for that reason.

Yes.

Perfectly.

What we need is delivery riders on less stable bikes doing 30-odd miles an hour down the street the wrong way with our food.

Because in the city, Uber Eats are people on motorized bicycles.

It’s not people in cars and all the other delivery systems.

So, that’s all I can tell you on that, Gary.

Were you good to go on that?

Yeah, so just remember Weebles.

I was fascinated by the balancing pole, because that is something I’m thinking, that’s for balance.

But it’s not.

It’s a different thing altogether.

It’s a different…

For what you said, the center of mass is for center of mass.

It’s to keep the center of mass as low as possible.

And in some cases, the center of mass is…

In fact, I think it’s in every case.

The center of mass is below the wire.

So that as you tip, the center of mass says, I want to get as low…

Again, I want to get as close to the center of earth as possible.

And that’s directly below the wire.

And you’re on top of the wire, so everybody’s stable.

There it is.

Interesting.

So it’s not as dangerous as they make out, then?

I think most things are not.

That’s correct.

If you boost the odds in your favor by training, by practice, by physics, then anyone else looking at what you do is imagining themselves in that situation and how dangerous it would be for them.

They’re not imagining you in that situation, imagining how non-dangerous it otherwise is for those who are trained.

All right, that’s all we got time for.

This has been another installment of Things You Thought You Knew.

This time, a StarTalk Sports Edition.

Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist, and I’ve been with Gary O’Reilly and Chuck Nice.

As always, I bid you, keep looking up.

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You know you can tell me anything.

I’m capital VFD42, capital Z, lowercase M, underscore, lowercase P, capital L, reverse slash, apostrophe, lowercase RS.

I know how you feel.

Just between us, I’m underscore, comma, dash, underscore, dollar sign, capital G, lowercase W, comma, forward slash, dash, dash, reverse slash.

No way.

I am so glad we had this conversation.

I know, me too.

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