Ballgebra
September 25th, 2008
Stop the press! When us dogs catch tennis balls, we’re actually solving very complicated differential equations. This is news to me! There I was thinking that I was just using my eyes and accumulated sense of judgment to hone in on something that’s round, furry and fun to chew. How wrong it was of me to presume that when I run after balls, I’m merely adjusting my speed and trajectory from moment to moment in response to the change in movement of my target from moment to moment. Nope - I’m actually, without knowing it, whipping out a pocket calculator, pencil and paper and working out the point of intersection between two parabolas. Who’da thunk it?
What this also means of course is that dogs were terrible at catching balls before Sir Issac Newton came on the scene and taught us how to do it in 1687. Coincidentally, this was also the year after which dog ownership really took off. Now I know why - we just weren’t much fun before then.
I guess this revelation is hardly surprising. It’s long been known, for example, that dogs become experts on rocket science when they hear a human yell “bath time.”
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