What if you threw a baseball at nearly light speed?

[Kaodi]

Would the "baseball" even slowdown appreciably from the nuclear explosions? They seems rather more finite than the amount of energy needed to accelerate a baseball to that velocity.

 

[Vael]

I love the explosion sounds

 

[Umbran]

The question: Would you be able to tell the difference?

Yes. Yankees fans would collapse without a nemesis to abuse

It would be outside the strike zone, since it would have had much less time for gravity to pull it down.

Well, the pitcher could have aimed down a smidge.

 

[Umbran]

Would the "baseball" even slowdown appreciably from the nuclear explosions?

An "explosion" is really an event on the short end of the human timescale. But events around that ball are happening on a nanosecond timescale - they are fusion reactions, not explosions.

But I think Randall might have missed an important bit. He's treating the baseball as too solid.

Let us think from the ball's point of view for a moment. The ball thinks there's a bunch of air moving at it at 0.9c! In essence, the ball experiences what is effectively a very high energy particle/cosmic ray beam the density of Earth air!

Cosmic rays mostly pass through normal matter, which is mostly empty space, after all. A typical cosmic ray can pass through a couple inches of solid gold - a couple of inches of baseball are not as much an issue.

When they do interact, they most frequently kick electrons off atoms as they pass by, and ionize the matter. Only very rarely does a cosmic ray yield a full nuclear reaction (the nucleus is a tiny target to hit). And that doesn't only happen at the surface - the ray particle will pass through some thickness before it hits something directly enough to interact, possibly passing through without interacting at all. All those interactions will happen throughout the body of the baseball, not only at the leading surface.

Moreover, nuclear fusion might be suppressed, because the encounter speed/energy is too high - fusion happens when nuclei collide and stick to each other in deuterium fusion, the particles are moving somewhere around 0.1c. If the interaction speed/energy is too high, they don't stick, they plow through each other, breaking each other apart - the result is more like fission.

 

[Gammadoodler]

What if you threw a baseball at nearly light speed?​

The Dodgers would sign you.

"And in a corresponding move..the Los Angeles Dodgers have used every available draft pick on backup catchers..

When asked about the moves, GM Andrew Friedman replied 'Well we expect some amount of attrition this year and wanted to make sure we were prepared for it.'

One scout, speaking on condition of anonymity described the attributes the Dodgers were looking for in these draft picks. "First thing was, do they have family.."

 

[Gammadoodler]

And here I was going to say something stupid like the Red Sox still would not spend the $ for him. I did not know if would blow up a mile around Fenway Park, which may or may not be a bad thing.

Probably best to use the guy in away games. I'd expect some pretty extreme home/road splits.

 

[Clint_L]

should watch it,it's educational

I don't really need to - in my theory of knowledge class someone asked what would happen if Superman actually punched someone as hard as he could, so we worked out the math - it wasn't too hard after we estimated the mass of his fist. And it turned out there's a whole video on it as well, so we watched that a few classes later and were pleased to see that we pretty much nailed it; we even got the diameter of the the bast zone more or less accurate.

Then we tried to work out how much pizza Flash would have to eat to actually run at close to light speed. It's a lot.

 

[Gradine]

It would be outside the strike zone, since it would have had much less time for gravity to pull it down.

In Munroe's estimation the batter* would technically be "hit by pitch" and therefore advance to first base*.



*Granted, if either still exist at this point, which they wont

 

[The Soloist]

Erased by user. Wrong thread.

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

You get Brockian Ultra-Cricket.