EGGSZACTLY... ahum... so said my friend...
If you're finished googling, maybe
you your friend could help me check my math.
You see, I have a hypothesis regarding a terrible injury last year to a future gold glove shortstop. The theory involved is objects executing motion around a point possess a quantity called angular momentum. This is an important physical quantity because all experimental evidence indicates that angular momentum is rigorously conserved in our Universe: it can be transferred, but it cannot be created or destroyed. For the simple case of a small mass executing uniform circular motion around a much larger mass (so that we can neglect the effect of the center of mass) the amount of angular momentum takes a simple form.
(http://i58.photobucket.com/albums/g273/mihoba/angmom.gif)
As the above figure illustrates the magnitude of the angular momentum in this case is L = mvr, where L is the angular momentum, m is the mass of the small object, v is the magnitude of its velocity, and r is the separation between the objects.
Are you with me?
This formula indicates one important physical consequence of angular momentum: because the above formula can be rearranged to give v = L/(mr) and L is a constant for an isolated system, the velocity v and the separation r are inversely correlated. Thus, conservation of angular momentum demands that a decrease in the separation r be accompanied by an increase in the velocity v, and vice versa.
So what exactly does that mean?
I have come to the conclusion that Carlos Lee is a big horse and plowed Adam's poor little skinny ass down.
