Grade 9 · Science
The Science of a Curveball
For well over a century, batters have complained that a good curveball seems to fall off a table just as it reaches the plate. For almost as long, some people insisted that the curve was an illusion, a trick of the eye rather than a real change in the ball's path. The question was finally settled by physics. In 1959, a physicist named Lyman Briggs dropped spinning baseballs through a wind tunnel and measured how far the moving air pushed them sideways.
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