http://ianlouisharris.com/2019/07/09/a-day-of-sport-in-exile-mostly-middlesex-v-gloucestershire-at-merchant-taylors-school-9-july-2019/

Such an exciting, concluding day three of county championship cricket.

Agree completely.

So he simultaneously hit a 4 (the ball interacted with the boundary rope, but also the ground), narrowly avoided playing on (the ball interacted with the stumps, but the bails failed to be dislodged… again) and was also close to being out LBW (the ball interacted with his legs, but luckily it was umpires call due to being within 1,000km either way)?

I know, because I was within 3,000km of Edgbaston yesterday, so I was there.

We can always rely on you to bring clarity to a situation with maths and/or physics.

But wait. Because the photons travel at the speed of light, the only things the ball is not interacting with are those objects outside its future light cone. We need a cut-off time, so let’s say one hundredth of a second. That means the ball is “touching” everything inside a 3,000km radius.

In other words, Jason Roy was NOT OUT. The ball bounced (interacted with the ground).

The thing is, the Laws of Cricket haven’t really adapted to the Rutherford-Bohr model of the atom, and have ignored Quantum Mechanical models completely. The outer shell electrons of all atoms, being negatively charged, repel the electrons of any neighbouring atom via the exchange of force mediating particles. For any electromagnetic interaction, those particles are photons, known more commonly as the indivisible and massless wave packets that constitute light. The outer layer of atoms in both the bat and the ball is likely to be carbon, which has a mean radius of 70 picometers, and the typical atomic spacing in any solid lattice is of the order of several angstroms.

In other words, the masses come nowhere near each other, and all that happens is that some photons are exchanged. And what did people say when they saw the replay? Yep, that they could see DAYLIGHT between the bat and the ball. That is, they could see photons between the bat and the ball, which is EXACTLY as one would expect in the case when, in the naïve sense, the bat touches the ball. You’re OUT Jason Roy, as out as it’s possible to be.

Cricket has a history of poorly implemented good ideas. See the substitute rule, for the short time it existed. Having to name 11 players before the toss almost always resulted in the team losing the toss using their sub before the game started.

…..over water, holding his papa’s hand.