Well, at least, the physics of the new NBA basketball, at any rate…<\/p>\n
For those who haven’t heard the story already, the NBA is changing the style of the basketballs used in its games this season. They’re moving away from the traditional leather basketballs to a new synthetic material, which is supposed to hold up better to wear and tear.<\/p>\n
Predictably enough, most of the players hate the new ball<\/a>, and Mavericks owner Mark Cuban has gone so far as to enlist physicists to look into the situation:<\/p>\n Jim Horwitz is chair of the physics department at UT-Arlington, and Kaushik De is the project leader and a physics professor at UTA. They were asked by Mavericks owner Mark Cuban to do a study about the differences between composite and leather balls. <\/p>\n What the physicists found was that the new ball, when dropped from a height of five feet, bounced an average of four inches lower than the old ball. In addition, the synthetic ball was much slower to absorb moisture, a key complaint among players who seem to be constantly losing their grip on the new spheroid in the preseason.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Ahh, the glamorous life of a scientist… Were the guys from Mythbusters<\/cite> busy this week?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Well, at least, the physics of the new NBA basketball, at any rate… For those who haven’t heard the story already, the NBA is changing the style of the basketballs used in its games this season. They’re moving away from the traditional leather basketballs to a new synthetic material, which is supposed to hold up… Continue reading Physics of Basketball<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26,33,7,11,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-726","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-basketball","category-in_the_news","category-physics","category-science","category-sports","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/726","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=726"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/726\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=726"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=726"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=726"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n