Usain Bolt holds the current record at 9.58 (per the web)
Is there any way to mathematically determine the limit of this record?
Intuitively we know, for example, that a human will never run 100m in 5 sec. So we know the fastest time the 100m can possibly be run in is
5 < record <= 9.58
But is there a way to figure out what this record may never pass (assuming no wind-aided)? There has to be a limit that a human will never be able to reach.
The Science of Sport (2010)
Well, it’s physically impossible to run faster than the speed of light, so there’s that…
Supposedly, The Flash can run faster.
Why ? Sure , muscle bulk isn’t the way to go faster…
Bolt may have a special sort of muscle. If the mother of his children is also a fast runner, or at a lower chance, due to spontaneous changes (recombination … ) , the molecules of his childrens muscles may be a little better than his at 'Fast twitch"…
I also wonder if its neuron speed as well …
Never say never. Didn’t they believe for decades that humans were physically incapable of running faster than a 4 minute mile? Until someone did it.
True, but surely there is some limit - to take it to a (ridiculous) extreme, a human will never run a mile in one second, right?
The femoral neck will fracture at around 10 g (unless it’s made of titanium!). So that’s the theoretical maximum acceleration. t=Sqrt(2s/a) gives a minimum of 2 seconds for a 100 m race.
Not very helpful, but still a lowest bound…
Sorry; forgot the square root in my last post. That should be 1.4 s!
(In practice, I guess it hardly matters though…)
No, there’s no mathematical reason a human couldn’t run much faster and we can only rule out the extreme cases.
There’s always the chance that we could come across a person that has a better kind of fast twitch muscle than we’d encountered previously, a more optimal foot shape / skeleton, better technique and knocks .3s off the record. I think it’s extremely unlikely to happen, but how could we possibly rule it out?
I read an article somewhere that said that, based on a statistical analysis of world record times in various footraces,* there was quite a bit of room for improvement in the record time for the 100 meters. I’m not sure how much, but I think it might have been along the lines of a second, or about 10%. Longer races, like the mile and the marathon, were much closer, proportionally speaking, to their limits.
Genetically engineered children could perhaps do this.
If we’re looking at acceleration, there’s also a limit imposed by friction. The runner’s acceleration in gees cannot be higher than the coefficient of static friction. But that doesn’t actually help much, because while it’s uncommon to see coefficients of friction greater than about 1 or so, there’s no actual hard-and-fast upper limit.
Wouldn’t the spikes they wear allow more than that?
Sorry to hijack, but was it ever widely believed that this was impossible? :dubious:
Greyhounds can rapidly accelerate to a speed of 20 meters per second, and whippets and cheetahs can both accelerate and run even faster. Considering these animals have evolved (cheetahs) or been designed (the dogs) to move as fast as possible, a 3 to 4 second 100 m might be the lower limit for mammals. It seems unlikely a bipedal can move that fast, though. On the other hand, humans are much more motivated to train obsessively and try harder to move faster than are animals who don’t value medals and ribbons all that much.
Absolutely true. And it was scientists of the day making the claim, not some sports fan spouting off.
Scientists of that day also said it would be impossible for a women to run a marathon. (Until one did and she had to do it in secret.)
As a track and field fan (not a scientist), I believe we will see a sub 9 second 100 meter run, but that will be it. We will never see a sub 8 second 100 meter.
I predict we eventually we will come up with some sort of performance enhancing drug that can’t possibly be banned, or realize that the banning of PEDs that have no health drawbacks is stupid (whichever is applicable; I don’t know if the latter exist and are banned as I don’t follow this much), and records will improve.
I am going to guess that when you start to approach the level where the coefficient of friction is that critical, the spikes themselves will introduce another limit tied to their release load (the effort it takes to pull them out of the track).
Yeah, there is some limit