Some Cool Science Using a Basketball

Are you familiar with "The Magnus Effect?" Yeah...me either. Well, at least I wasn't until my wife passed this video along to me.

In a nutshell, The Magnus Effect is (according to Wikipedia):

...the commonly observed effect in which a spinning ball (or cylinder) curves away from its principal flight path. It is important in many ball sports. It affects spinning missiles, and has some engineering uses, for instance in the design of rotor ships and Flettner aeroplanes.

In terms of ball games, topspin is defined as spin about a horizontal axis perpendicular to the direction of travel, where the top surface of the ball is moving forward with the spin. Under the Magnus effect, topspin produces a downward swerve of a moving ball, greater than would be produced by gravity alone, and backspin has the opposite effect.[1] Likewise side-spin causes swerve to either side as seen during some baseball pitches, e.g. leg break.[2] The overall behaviour is similar to that around an airfoil (see lift force) with a circulation which is generated by the mechanical rotation, rather than by airfoil action.[3]

The Magnus effect is named after Gustav Magnus, the German physicist who investigated it. The force on a rotating cylinder is known as Kutta-Joukowski lift,[4] after Martin Wilhelm Kutta and Nikolai Zhukovsky (or Joukowski) who first analyzed the effect.

 

Got all that? Yeah...me neither. Here is a much, much cooler way to learn about it:

Oh, and that world record basketball shot he talks about in the video is right here:

I would have done so much better in school if only they had let me throw stuff off of dams.