Exercise your brain for a moment

You know, I saw these jetpacks in action at the World's Fair in '64 and again at Expo '67 and I'm still waiting ...

 

Theoretically, the two logical approaches are the same, only with the exponential progression, it would take much longer to shave it down to zero.

I read somewhere that scientists had calculated what they believed to be the limits of human physical performance, but I forget where ...

 

Reductio ad absurdum.

FTJ's original formulation that the time for the mile has fallen 16 seconds in the last 45 years can't be used as a strict predictor of future times in the same event.

If times were to continue dropping at the same rate, then in 627 years the world record for the mile would be 0:00.

Zeno's paradoxes - like Achilles and the Tortoise - speak to the same point: that common sense reckonings can't always be used to predict simple results.

 

And in 672 years, the winner would be crossing the finish line 16 seconds before the gun goes off.

 

I read "The Perfect Mile" about Bannister, Landy and Santee's race to break the four-minute mile. In the 1935, a well-respected coach wrote a piece using educated studies to figure out what the limit would be in every track and field event.

He stated that humans could not possibly run the mile any faster than 4:01.6. For 17 years, everyone thought it was completely accurate.

 

One reason the mile record has stood for a while is because the mile isn't run as much any more, and the event run more frequently is the 1500 meters.

The 200-meter record stood for a long time before Michael Johnson broke the record because runners took the 100-meter and 400-meter races more seriously.

Besides drugs and training, there can be a lot of reasons for track records. It could be conditions - Beamon's long jump was in Mexico City which has a higher elevation, but nobody else broke the record in those games so it could have just been an athlete at his peak hitting everything right on one jump.

 

Not quite your point, but I've always suspected there's somebody out there that could do something better than the "world's greatest." There was somebody on the planet that could have dominated Muhammed Ali, he just didn't step into the ring. There's somebody that runs faster than the 100-meter record holder, he's just never done it near a track (or a wandering track coach). There's somebody that could throw faster than Nolan Ryan, he's just doing it with rocks to kill supper in a forrest somewhere.

 

I read a book about the outstanding Los Angeles Kings announcer, Bob Miller. Most of the book was about his career talking about covering the Kings, but he talked about interviewing Jesse Owens during the early 1960s. He asked Owens about his feeling about having his records broken, and Owens at the time said he thought the biggest factor was improved prenatal care made for more healthy people. Interesting insight.