3080: Tennis Balls

Tennis Balls

|< < Prev #3080 (April 23, 2025) Next > >|

Title text: After initial tests created a series of large holes in the wall of the lab, the higher-power Scanning Tunneling Tennis Ball Microscope project was quickly shut down.

|< < Prev Random Explanation Next > >|

Explanation

This explanation is incomplete: The first sentence might be a little too short, maybe we should give examples where scanning electron microscope are used? Could use clarification on what is needed for quantum tunneling to happen. If you can fix this issue, edit the page!

A scanning electron microscope produces images of a sample by scanning the surface with a focused beam of electrons, and interpreting the different signals that are generated in response. Since Megan and Cueball find electrons too small to work with, they have created a macroscopic version using tennis balls instead. The tennis ball launcher uses a similar mechanism to a scanning electron microscope: it fires tennis balls, instead of electrons, over a wide range of heights, and detects objects obstructing the stream (in this case a person) by the noises generated on impact. However, this would mostly be 'useful' in scanning things at a macroscopic level, so is not really a microscope. Computational microscopy can be used to increase the resolution of an image beyond the size of the sampling medium by extensively analyzing details of interactions, and a tennis ball microscope could potentially be used to tune such algorithms at an observable scale — the joke of striking a human, as well as the manual single-ball operation, imply that Randall did not intend this use.

Megan and Cueball have detected a person using their device, by the fact that it generated two yells during the scan, possibly from impacting the person's face and another sensitive part of their body. They intend to repeat the experiment to determine the person's height, by working out the angle of the tennis balls that generate the yells. Combined with the velocity and time to impact, this should give them enough information to work out the height above ground at impact and the distance from the launcher. The joke is that this height measurement could probably have been completed with a visual assessment, and with far more accuracy than using tennis balls to approximate their height. Most humans work with large-scale objects in their day-to-day lives and hence do not see by using a microscope, although the lens in the eye operates on the same principal as the objective lens in an optical one. This method is also likely to be problematic, as the person would likely duck or run away in response to being bombarded with tennis balls, affecting future measurements. This is known as the Observer Effect as well as a normal consideration of sampling. (It may also be why the 'scanning' is done from the top down, as early low-hitting projectiles might reduce the height that later projectiles can detect.)

The title text is a reference to scanning tunneling microscopes, which take advantage of the quantum tunnelling effect. In this case, the tennis balls were actually tunneling through the wall, creating holes in the process, which is not what tunneling electrons would do. Tunneling is a non-intuitive quantum phenomenon whereby particles may "teleport" across a barrier they would otherwise bounce off of, but it requires a number of particles of extremely low mass to exploit quantum effects, with a comparatively thin barrier, to be observable. It would not be reasonable to produce this effect at tennis ball scale with any typical building wall, but naively attempting to do so by launching tennis balls at a sufficiently high velocity (the required speed dependant upon whether they are aimed at the likes of plasterboard, brick or concrete) could lead to damaging the wall instead. "Scanning Tunneling Tennis Ball Microscope" capable of launching tennis balls at velocities, sufficient to do large holes in lab walls (presumably, concrete), could be very useful as a weapon—especially if tennis balls were swapped for stronger projectiles (e.g. tennis-ball-sized lead or steel bullets).

Transcript

[Cueball fires eight tennis ball at decreasing heights using a tennis ball machine, which makes four "thunk" noises. Megan is standing behind him. The tennis ball machine has a container for tennis balls at the top, which is connected to a tube where the balls are launched. Behind the machine is a handle that Cueball holds with both hands to control the machine, and at the bottom is a stand with two legs.]

[Cueball has stopped firing tennis balls and is resting his hand on the handle of the machine. Ten noises come from the right side of the panel:]

Bonk

Bonk

Bonk

Bonk

Bonk

OW!

Bonk

OW!

Bonk

Bonk

[Megan has her hand to her chin.]

Megan: Ok, there's definitely a person over there. Let's do one more pass to try to measure their height.

[Caption below the panel:]

Electrons are small and hard to work with, so some scientists have developed a scanning tennis ball microscope instead.

Trivia

Atomic electron tomography uses electrons to precisely identify and map the individual atoms of a sample and is leading to extensive novel materials research.

  Add comment        Create topic (use sparingly)       Refresh 

Discussion

feels more like a macroscope to me GreyFox (talk) 23:53, 23 April 2025 (UTC)

Weirdly, Wikipedia has pages for pitching machines, bowling machines, and squash ball launchers, but doesn't appear to have one for tennis ball machines. (And no, I'm not going to create one specially for this comic.) 172.71.241.89 08:42, 24 April 2025 (UTC)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squash_ball_machine Similar? -Anon 172.69.208.203 13:31, 24 April 2025 (UTC)

OTOH, Wikimedia has a photo and a couple of diagrams of tennis ball machines: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Tennis_ball_machines and 3 photos of "Tenniskanon" https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?search=Tenniskanon&title=Special:MediaSearch&type=image . I checked and the nobody has yet created the Tenniskanon page in nl.wikipedia.org Rps (talk) 13:15, 24 April 2025 (UTC)

I added the comments on even smaller forms of microscopy to the article. I found these in an article I read in a friend's Nature magazine, I've almost never read Nature and this article was so interesting. There was further similar content that I wanted to add but I haven't found the article again to reference it -- there's a kind of microscopy where the energy of the probe is turned way up, so that the sample is actually immediately destroyed by the probe, but by collecting the resulting scattering it can then be reconstructed. This is relevant to the paragraph on the observer effect. There is also some kind of microscopy (pump probe?) that can collect very high-time-resolution imagery. I asked for this article at https://www.reddit.com/r/Scholar/comments/1k6vfcr/article_miao_j_computational_microscopy_with because as an ex-hobby-software-engineer I found it so interesting that simple computer algorithms could be so powerful somewhere. I think it is sad however that this comic models detached nerds harming a passerby as humor. People who are extensively exposed to a mode of research do indeed tend to apply it to other domains, because it's what they understand, but we also want them to apologize if somebody is injured :) 162.158.154.192 16:00, 24 April 2025 (UTC)

With amusingly coincidental timing, I was recently made aware of a growing number of scientific papers that describe "vegetative electron microscopes", instead of "scanning electron microscopes", and I figure others here would also find it amusing: https://www.sciencealert.com/a-strange-phrase-keeps-turning-up-in-scientific-papers-but-why The predominant theories to explain it are either that AI was trained on a pair of poorly-digitized papers from the 50s, or a translation error from Farsi, where a single dot makes the difference between "vegetative" and "scanning". Personally I find the latter explanation more likely, or perhaps a combination of the two factors.

Not sure how this concept would translate to implementing a vegetative tennis ball microscope. Maybe replace the tennis balls with brussel sprouts or cabbages. PotatoGod (talk) 05:40, 28 April 2025 (UTC)

On the translation front, it reminds me of some documents that came into the steel-works that had been part of a project that had had foreign involvement (and translations a2ay from English, then back into English), back in the '80s. There was a mention of "water sheep" which (from one or other translations perhaps being done by non-technical people, mixing up their cognates/etc) turned out to really mean "hydraulic rams". 172.71.178.160 11:31, 28 April 2025 (UTC)
        Add comment