this question comes from Ellen who asks what would happen if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90% the speed of light let's set aside the question of how we got the baseball moving that fast we'll suppose that it's a normal pitch except in the instant the pitcher releases the ball it magically accelerates to9 C from that point onward everything proceeds according to normal physics and what proceeds turns out to be a lot of things and they all happen very quickly and it doesn't end well for the batter or the pitcher what follows is
my best guess at a nond by nanc portrait the ball is going so fast that everything else is practically stationary even the molecules in the air are stationary air molecules vibrate back and forth at a few hundred milph but the ball is moving through them at 600 million mph this means that as far as the ball is concerned they're just hanging there Frozen the ideas of aerodynamics don't apply here normally air would flow around anything moving through it but the air molecules in front of this ball don't have time to be jostled out of the
way the ball smacks into them so hard that the atomic nuclei in the air molecules actually fuse with the atomic nuclei in the ball each Collision releases a burst of gamma rayss and Scattered subatomic particles these gamma rays and debris expand outward in a bubble centered around the pitcher's mound they start to tear apart the molecules in the air ripping electrons from nuclei and turning the air in the stadium into an expanding bubble of incandescent plasma the surface of the bubble approaches the batter at about the speed of light only slightly ahead of the ball
itself the constant Fusion at the front of the ball pushes back on it slowing it down as if the ball were a rocket flying tail first while firing nuclear fusion engines unfortunately the ball is going so fast that even the tremendous force from this ongoing thermonuclear explosion barely slows it down at all it does however start to eat away at the surface blasting tiny particulate fragments of the ball in all directions these fragments are going so fast that when they hit air molecules they trigger two or three more rounds of fusion after about 60 NS
the shell of x-rays arrives at home plate and a handful of NCS later the ball hits the batter hasn't even seen the piture let go of the ball since the light carrying that information arrives at about the same time as the shock wave collisions with the air have eaten the ball away almost completely and it is now a bullet-shaped cloud of expanding plasma mainly carbon oxygen hydrogen and nitrogen ramming into the air and triggering more Fusion as it goes when it reaches the batter the center of the cloud is still moving in an appreciable fraction
of the speed of light it hits the bat first but then the batter plate and catcher are all scooped up and carried backward through the back stop as they disintegrate the shell of X-rays and superheated plasma expands outward and upward swallowing the back stop both teams the stands and the surrounding neighborhood all in the first microsc suppose you're watching from a Hilltop outside the city the thing you see is a blinding flash far out shining the sun this gradually Fades over the course of a few seconds and a growing Fireball Rises into a mushroom cloud
then with a great Roar the blast wave arrives tearing up trees and shredding houses everything within roughly a mile of the park is leveled and a firestorm engulfs the surrounding City the baseball diamond is now a sizable crater centered a few hundred ft behind the former location of the back stop a careful reading of official Major League Baseball rule 5.05 B2 suggests that in this situation the batter would be cons considered hit by pitch and would be eligible to advance to first [Music] base
