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September 25, 2019 - May 9, 2020
velocity?
If the Earth stopped and the air didn’t, the result would be a sudden thousand-mile-per-hour wind. The wind would be highest at the equator, but everyone and everything living between 42 degrees north and 42 degrees south—which includes about 85 percent of the world’s population—would suddenly experience supersonic winds.
If you’re going to wait it out, one of the best places to do it might be Helsinki, Finland. While its high latitude—above 60°N—wouldn’t be enough to keep it from being scoured clean by the winds, the bedrock below Helsinki contains a sophisticated network of tunnels, along with a subterranean shopping mall, hockey rink, swimming complex, and more.
it doesn’t end well for the batter (or the pitcher).
The ball would be going so fast that everything else would be practically stationary. Even the molecules in the air would stand still. Air molecules would vibrate back and forth at a few hundred miles per hour, but the ball would be moving through them at 600 million miles per hour. This means that as far as the ball is concerned, they would just be hanging there, frozen.
air molecules in front of this ball wouldn’t have time to be jostled out of the way. The ball would smack into them so hard that
the atoms in the air molecules would actually fuse with the atoms in the ball’s surface. Each collision would release a burst of gamma rays and scattered particles.1
These gamma rays and debris would expand outward in a bubble centered on the pitcher’s mound. They would start to tear apart the molecules in the air, ripping the electrons from the nuclei and turning the air in the stadium into an expanding bubble of incandescent plasma.
It would, however, start to eat away at the surface, blasting tiny fragments of the ball in all directions. These fragments would be going so fast that when they hit air molecules, they would trigger two or three more rounds of fusion.
It would hit the bat first, but then the batter, plate, and catcher would all be scooped up and carried backward through the backstop as they disintegrated. The shell of x-rays and superheated plasma would expand outward and upward, swallowing the backstop, both teams, the stands, and the surrounding neighborhood—all in the first microsecond.
Everything within roughly a mile of the park would be leveled, and a firestorm would engulf the surrounding city. The baseball diamond, now a sizable crater, would be centered a few hundred feet behind the former location of the backstop.
Major League Baseball Rule 6.08(b) suggests that in this situation, the batter would be considered “hit by pitch,” and would be eligible to advance to first base.
What if every day, every human had a 1 percent chance of being turned into a turkey, and every turkey had a 1 percent chance of being turned into a human?
