Discovering Your Inner Physicist with Neil deGrasse Tyson

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In an all-animal Olympics, what event would we win? Neil deGrasse Tyson, Chuck Nice, and Gary O’Reilly discuss the innate physics understanding in humans. We explore human’s ability to catch moving objects and hand-eye coordination. Is there such a thing as over-pursuit? Who makes more spectacular catches: someone who is fast or someone who is slow? All that, plus, we marvel at the natural physicist within all of us.

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Science meets pop culture on StarTalk! Astrophysicist & Hayden Planetarium director Neil deGrasse Tyson, his comic co-hosts, guest celebrities & scientists discuss astronomy, physics, and everything else about life in the universe. Keep Looking Up!

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30 thoughts on “Discovering Your Inner Physicist with Neil deGrasse Tyson”

  1. From my experience catching a flyball in the outfield, landing a plane, and avoiding ship collisions use the same technique…..it is called zeroing the line-of-sight rate. You hold your head steady, and watch the object in your eye's field-of-view…..if it is stationary in your view you will be at the right place at the right time….if not, you adjust until it is fixed. Takes some practice, but it is fairly easy to learn the technique. By the way, outfielders can get a jump on the ball, if going left, right or right at you, by watching the bat angle as the ball is hit. also with a little practice you can get very good at it.

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  11. I think that being quick is a bit more important than fast 🤔.
    Humans wouldn’t win this event, intercepting a moving target, against dragonflies…just saying. 😁

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  12. What about dogs, with balls and Frisbees or a cat with a bird in flight or a squirrel on the run? With that, what about dragonflies catching bugs in flight or predatory birds catching other birds in flight or rodents on the ground? I feel that there are way more species than just humans with this ability. One more… a seal catching a penguin?

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  13. We would at least place in long distance running. Few animals have the ability to run as long as humans do. That's our physical niche. Horses are close, but more for long distance walking with a load. There may be other animals I'm unfamiliar with that are good at this as well. Dogs don't do to bad either, but the last 40k years working with humans helped select for this. Look up exhaustion hunting for how this has been to our advantage in ancient times.

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  18. @neildegrassetyson Dr. Tyson, around 3:40, the outfielder does not travel at a constant rate towards the ball flying along a parabolic rate. Nor does the outfielder run in a straight line. Far from it. The outfielder accelerates, maintains a speed, then generally deaccelerates, to comfortably catch the ball in the mitt. The use of acceleration (+ and -) is the skill, of which I think most animals do just as well. Just watch a dog chasing a frisbee. In fact, all carnivores seem extremely good at this, so we really are not that special at all.

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  19. What, nobody ever seen a dog leap and catch a ball mid-air? They're probably better at it than we are, they don't need a glove they just catch it with their teeth…..and I hate dogs, I'm a cat person but I still recognize that dumb dogs can predict where to be to catch a ball(heck, when my cats are feeling energetic they can catch a little one with two paws after I've bounced it off the wall, they just aren't interested the majority of the time). Also think about birds that prey on other birds. If they didn't have physics programmed into their brains, do you think that one flying animal would have a chance at grabbing another flying animal out of the sky for dinner?

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  22. I've seen birds of pray do the same thing with fish. the often times with catch a fish from the stream(using this math), then if it's a young bird of prey, they will toss the fish to one another in mid flight. sharping, this skill. awesome to watch!

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  29. I don't find it specially surprisingly… The Horizontal velocity of the ball is linear (in vacuum) o near linear (low speeds or short distances)… So intercepting the trajectory of the ball would be a linear race… Which I would consider pretty simple to have intuition on…
    Non linear processes are the hard ones… Like COVID spread…

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