When Baseball Threw Physics a Curve
October 28, 2025 at 11:39PM“Could baseballs really bend along their path, or was it all a collective delusion?” For Pioneer Works Broadcast, Brad Bolman explores the controversies surrounding the curveball since baseball’s rise in popularity at the end of the 19th century—and what these debates reveal about science, shared reality, and American values. It’s a smart and stimulating read, and especially timely for anyone watching this year’s World Series.
A century of debate about the curve shows how professional and amateur sports served as venues not only for entertainment but for knowledge production. Curving baseballs invited researchers to rethink their understanding of physics and test inherited theories against physical demonstration. In turn, the debates brought new understandings of physics to a reading and sporting public. Debating the curve was an opportunity to grapple with the complexity of our physical world. But the curve controversies were also about what it meant to live in that world, and particularly what it meant to be American; about truth and deception in public life. The very question of whether there is such a thing as a curveball revealed how our societies and our knowledge of the physical world evolve in constant dialogue.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/10/28/baseball-curveball-physics/
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