An indelible image from last month’s Olympic Games came when Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt dominated the 100-meter dash so completely that he began to celebrate before the race was over. He set a new world record, but how much faster could he have gone if he hadn’t slowed down for a victory dance? For all of those who have been waiting with bated breath to know for sure, a team of physicists at the Theoretical Astrophysics at the University of Oslo, Norway, has figured it out. * Bolt may have been able to shave a full .14 seconds off his finish, had he run the race normally. Maybe for their next project those scientists can calculate what else they could have studied in the time it took them to figure this one out.
(Thanks, New Scientist)
Image by Richard Giles, licensed under Creative Commons.
* Correction: The item originally read “with baited breath.” It has been corrected
