Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

Significance Junkies
of mass of the player's body during a slam dunk is briefly in orbit
about the centre of the Earth.
To get the ball in the basket, you must loft it at exactly the right
speed; a one per cent error and gravity will make you look bad.
Three-point shooters, whether they know it or not, compensate
for aerodynamic drag. Each successive bounce of a dropped
basketball is nearer to the ground because of the Second Law of
Thermodynamics. Daryl Dawkins or Shaquille O'Neal shattering
a backboard is an opportunity for teaching - among some other
things - the propagation of shock waves. A spin shot off the glass
from under the backboard goes in because of the conservation of
angular momentum. It's an infraction of the rules to touch the
basketball in 'the cylinder' above the basket; we're now talking
about a key mathematical idea: generating n-dimensional objects
by moving (n - l)-dimensional objects.
In the classroom, in newspapers and on television, why aren't
we using sports to teach science?
When I was growing up, my father would bring home a daily
paper and consume (often with great gusto) the baseball box
scores. There they were, to me dry as dust, with obscure abbreviations
(W, SS, K, W-L, AB, RBI), but they spoke to him.
Newspapers everywhere printed them. I figured maybe they
weren't too hard for me. Eventually I too got caught up in the
world of baseball statistics. (I know it helped me in learning
decimals, and I still cringe a little when I hear, usually at the very
beginning of the baseball season, that someone's 'batting a
thousand'. But 1.000 is not 1,000. The lucky player is batting one.)
Or take a look at the financial pages. Any introductory material?
Explanatory footnotes? Definitions of abbreviations?
Almost none. It's sink or swim. Look at those acres of statistics!
Yet people voluntarily read the stuff. It's not beyond their ability.
It's only a matter of motivation. Why can't we do the same with
maths, science and technology?
In every sport the players seem to perform in streaks. In basketball
it's called the hot hand. You can do no wrong. I remember a
play-off game in which Michael Jordan, not ordinarily a superb
long-range shooter, was effortlessly making so many consecutive
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