The physics of soccer (or "football" in the rest of the world) has been analyzed! - the mechanics of how the ball moves, and the biomechanics of how the goalie and kicker (striker) move - and found that there's around 30% of the goal area that the goalie physically can't get to before the ball. His only hope is to guess which way the ball's gonna be kicked and move that way before the actual kick. Here, statistics comes to the rescue: "It's been shown that in about 85 percent of cases the direction in which that foot points is the direction of the shot." [CNN/Reuters]
Neato. Too bad they're confusingly linking to the article throughout CNN as "Score one for quantum science" - the scientist (Ken Bray) doing the research (published in a "press release" -style book, "How to Score") is a quantum physicist by day, but there's absolutely no quantum to the explanation, just mechanics, bio, and stats.
06 May 2006
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2 comments:
The only new thing about this is that a scientist have now put it to words.
Every football player (I refuse to call it soccer) knows that the top corners are what to aim for while camouflaging the direction you are going to shoot the ball.
Not just words, but equations! Infinitely more powerful. :)
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