Cool Science

I'm a real sap so while this has nothing to do with science (except featuring a couple of exceptionally geeky people), I totally dug this story.

While Red Sox fans are wondering when they will starting winning again, here's a diversion : is there any chemistry in baseball? Well, let's leave the steroid controversy alone - it's too obvious and easy a target. Here's one oddball article with a loose chemistry reference. Also, a popular quantum mechanics trick is to use the DeBroglie relation to find the typical wavelength of a fastball. I'm lazy, so you can see here that a 90 mph fastball as a wavelength of just 10^-14 meters. But this stuff is pretty standard fare.

Not to worry, there is something a little more exotic and stimulating here : the stitching on the baseball. Chemists care a lot about symmetry - the symmetry of molecules can have profound consequences for their properties. As noted on one chemist's web page the stitching of a baseball has a very complex symmetry which could trick you into thinking that it would be possible to have the stiching in two different ways (let's say left- and right-handed). But in fact it's almost an optical illusion - there is only one way to stitch a baseball, and it's a symmetry form that somebody for some reason called an "Antipot" (here's a nice page that shows Antipot symmetry - scroll down a bit to get right to it).