Hello everyone! Thanks for stopping by my blog. I hope you liked my last post about How to Survive an Asteroid Attack and TIE Fighters. We now explore the interesting but simple topic; why do baseballs curve?

Whether or not the pitcher knows it, to pitch a curve ball, he applies the same principles that keep airplanes in the sky. A pitcher's well-executed curve ball befuddles the batter, creating a pressure difference by adding more pressure to one side of the ball than the other. This way, the ball curves away from its trajectory.

An effective, yet illegal way to make the ball curve is to scuff up the ball on one side so that it "throws" more air than the stitching allows for. Another factor is the air density through which the ball travels. In places such as the Denver mile-high Coors Field, the air is 20% thinner than at sea level or the ground, rendering curveballs less effective than Boston's Fenway Park. In the rare-field Martain atmosphere, curve balls have -1 curve.

You may have heard people joke about digging a tunnel straight through the Earth in the US and ending up in China. If the Americans calculated correctly though, they would end up in the Southern Indian Ocean. What would happen though? If you could somehow jump into the empty tunnel, you would gain speed until you reached Earth's molten core, where you would vaporize and or melt, bringing your experiment to a swift end. Ignoring this minute complication, you'd emerge from your trip with a new understanding of mass, gravity, and weight.

As you fell toward the core, the amount of mass between you and the core would have lessened, and the force of gravity-consequentially your weight as well would have lessened. When you reach the center, you will weigh exactly zero. After you pass the core, gravity kicks in and tugs you, slowing you down. Since your journey is gravitationally symmetrical, you'll reach the other end of the 8,000-mile jump in about 45 minutes, with no remaining speed. Unless you've pre-enlisted a friend (or a fish) to pull you out of the tunnel, you would yo-yo back to your starting jumping position.

If you want to escape the pull of Earth's gravity and be on your way to the moon and beyond, you'll want one the biggest rockets ever invented by mankind, the Saturn V, built in 1967 and retired in 1973. Since then, the amount of stuff being ferried from space stations and more has increased by a lot. To figure out the amount of fuel required for a mission, rocket scientists must first calculate the weight of the payload and how much fuel it needs to get the payload into space. Here's the complication; The weight of the fuel needed to take the payload into space is added INTO the total weight!

Now rocketeers must calculate how much more fuel it would take to take the payload and the previous fuel and so on. Behold, the merciless, pitiless, ruthless, unforgiving, rocket dilemma.

The branch of mathematics known as calculus was developed by Issac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz, although most components were found in India 3 centuries earlier. Calculus conceived exactly for this type of problem, offers the necessities to get our needed equation.

A Russian scientist named Konstantin Tsiolkovsky devised the main part of our rocket equation. In science talk, the equation told us that the fuel needed to lift a payload of x mass grows exponentially for every pound or other measurement unit added.

To gain a modicum of terrestrial insight, let's say you wanted to drive to Denver from Atlanta. You're not gonna make on one tank of gas right? Your gas tank isn't large enough. You need a much bigger tank to hold more gas-so large that the weight of the car becomes primarily the weight of the gas! Since the tank itself is full of gas that will eventually deplete, you will be able to drive to Denver.

Well, That's it for this blog! I hope you enjoyed it and found it interesting!