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August 2, 2007

Schrodinger's Bat

Interview With a Physicist

by Dan Fox

"I think physicists are the Peter Pans of the human race. They never grow up and they keep their curiosity." - Nobel Prize winner Isidor Isaac Rabi

I'm not a physicist, but I play one on the Internet. Seriously, I enjoy dabbling in the popular descriptions of physics and its history and, as you may have noticed, like to sprinkle a few tidbits into this column paying homage as it does to an interesting episode in the history of quantum mechanics.

One person on whom the meaning of the moniker "Schrodinger's Bat" was not lost is the subject of today's column. Dr. Alan Nathan is a Physics Professor working in the Nuclear Physics Lab at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Nathan received his B.S. in Physics in 1968 at the University of Maryland and then went to his earn a Masters and Doctorate at Princeton University in 1972 and 1975 respectively.

Dr. Nathan also happens to be a baseball and Red Sox fan, not necessarily in that order, and has been researching and writing about the interplay of physics and baseball for several years. He is active in the Society for American Baseball Research and you can read his work on his Physics of Baseball site. What follows are his thoughts on a few of the more prevalent intersections of physics and baseball.

Baseball Prospectus: You've been perhaps the most prolific person in writing on the physics of baseball over the last decade. How and when did your interest take hold and why did you start publishing on the subject?