Richard Feynman & the Spinning plate

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DOUGHBOYS
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Joined: Sat Feb 05, 2005 6:00 pm

Richard Feynman & the Spinning plate

Post by DOUGHBOYS » Tue Oct 24, 2017 8:38 am

Once upon a time, a college kid at Cornell threw a plate in a cafeteria.
Something I'm sure, has been done in every college cafeteria in America. But Cornell is an Ivy League school.
Another student by the name of Richard Feynman saw the plate being thrown and it interested him in a mathematical way.
Feynman noticed that the Cornell red insignia in the middle of the plate was only distinguished by its red coloring. He also noticed the turns of the plate were faster than the 'wobbles' of the plate.
He went to work and came up with this.....

; ; . For a circular disk of radius , mass and negligible thickness, the principal moments of inertia are , . The third Euler equation reduces to . Thus . This is the angular velocity of the plate about its axis of symmetry, and is taken as one of the initial conditions. The first two Euler equations are then satisfied by , , where . The motion of the rigid body in the space-fixed frame can be expressed in terms of the Euler angles , using the relations , , . If the axis of the plate is initially inclined by an angle from the vertical, with an angular velocity , then the motion of the plate is given by , , . The rotation of the plate is represented by , while its precession or "wobbling" is given by . As approaches 0, the wobbling frequency approaches twice the rotation frequency, but the wobbling amplitude also decreases.

Wow, that's a lot of smart.
Feynman noticed that if the angle of the plate was even slightly adjusted that the plate would spin faster, the wobbles remained the same. This evolved into quantum electrodynamics, and eventually, over a plate thrown by a guy in a college cafeteria, Feynman was winning a Nobel prize.
What does this have to do with fantasy baseball over the plate spinners that we used to see on the 'Ed Sullivan Show'?
Let me explain....

Once upon a time (again) Before the NFBC, there were experts. These experts were labeled as such through their magazines.
'Let our experts help you!'
'Written by experts'
And of course, my favorite: 'Written by 'real' experts'....(watch out for those non-real one's, of which, we are not one)

These experts were listened to by most blooming fantasy players.
After all, who else could they listen to?
There was no television speaking of fantasy. No radio.
And EEEK!, no podcasts.
The horror!

These experts started leagues which were thought to be the best in the country because, you know, they were the only experts. We followed these leagues and as fledgling students to teachers, we came up with methods that, we thought, could beat our teachers at their own game.
One experts rule of thumb was that hitters are more important than pitchers.
'Never draft pitchers early' was a crede passed down by every expert.
It is here that Richard Feynman enters with his wobbly plates.
Experts surmised that hitters can help with five categories, not just four as a starting pitcher would.
They also followed that there were 14 hitters in a roto format, while starting pitching effected just seven of most teams rosters.
In general, it was a poor man's method of applying Feynman's wobbly plate theory.

There are many hole's in the hitters being more important theorum.
One, is that a majority of hitters also do not effect five categories.
Another is that the top hitters one year, for the most part, were not the top hitters of the next year.
Another is that hitter's are broken down into the sub-categories of positions, so although there are twice as many hitting spots to fill, they cannot be filled by 'any' hitter.

When the NFBC began, most players used the strategy that the experts had taught.
But as each year progressed, pitchers began creeping into higher rounds.
Being a rebel myself, I remember taking Johan Santana in the first round of the 2005 draft with good results.
Now, the misapplied wobbly plate theory has been, for the most part, put to rest.
There will be four pitchers taken in the first round of most drafts this year.
Clayton Kershaw has already been taken as a number one choice in drafts.

Feynman may have been a good fantasy player, although I think not.
I'm guessing he would have focused too much on modern over analysis (heavy on the anal) of bat planes, angles, and speed than the players themselves.
Except for 'the real experts'. most experts now, don't want to be called experts.
And the real truth is that there really are no experts in our hobby.
Every fantasy player is the same. Each has different methods or theories to win their leagues.
In essence, we are trying to be the spin, to every other players wobbles.
On my tombstone-
Wait! I never had the perfect draft!

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