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: Created by a SCANNING WIKI BOT. Don't remove this notice too soon. 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 only be 'useful' in scanning things at a macroscopic level, so is not really a microscope.

Megan and Cueball have detected a person using their device, by the fact that it generated two yells during the scan, presumably from impacting the person's face and, er, somewhere further down. 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 do not see using a microscope.^{[citation needed]} 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. (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.

Transcript

[Cueball fires eight tennis ball at decreasing heights using a tennis ball machine, making four "thunk" noises. Megan is standing behind him.]

[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.

  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