All I can imagine is being in the stands, watching the pitcher wind up for the Warp Ball, then a blur of red mist, dirt and a mushroom cloud forming over home plate; the concussion hits the bleachers, then… the screaming and the pandemonium.
Uh huh. I just read the full article. I see the screaming and the pandemonium would be many miles away from Ground Zero.
Pay per view?
Pandemonium? Hell, Pablo “The Panda” Sandoval would try to swing at it, even if it was way outside.
Is a dirt circle that is no longer comprised of dirt and is not in the shape of a circle a dirt circle?
So basically, the baseball become a hydrogen bomb*; I never would have thought that would happen.
- Wolfram Alpha says 2.5 megatons for a 145 g baseball. Plus additional energy released from fusion.
But Yogi Berra would actually hit it.
And Casey would still strike out.
Pandamonium. Sounds like a new heavy element to be named upon the fusion of him and his bat. Decays in nanoseconds.
Great thread. So, how fast do you need to throw the pitch to merely detonate the bat and batter, while leaving the pitcher (mostly) intact? At those speeds, we’d be talking kinetic energy rather than fusion.
The speed of a typical meteor impact aught to do the trick; about 4 or 5 miles a second.
But The Babe would point out into the stands to show where his ashes would land.
Juuuuuust a bit outside…
You’re missing the 0.5.
Am I right in guessing that if the game was being played in a vacuum–everyone has p-suits on, say–nothing would happen until the ball hit the bat?
This is one of the many reasons I love XKCD.
That’s a classic story, nice reference. I think it had to do with sending the ball on a time travel experiment and when it rematerialized the Earth was now going the other direction in its orbit, or something like that.
As I remember it, it was a bet between a theoretical physicist and an engineer about what would happen if a billiard ball was turned to pure energy or something. The engineer engineered (heh) the whole thing such that the theoretical physicist would bet a certain way and be right, but would ignore a side effect of the bet (i.e., that the billiard ball would leave the pure-energy-transformation field at the speed of light) and be murdered thereby. The two dudes hated one another, obviously.
[nitpick]There is a glaring error in either the story or the illustration.
The illustration does not show the batter in a bunt stance, which, with the exception of a really wild pitch, would be the only way for the ball to hit the bat.[/nitpick]