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Shooting
a lay-up, hang time and Michael Jordan.
(Full
page advertisement for the GTE Academic All-America Team in SPORTS ILLUSTRATED,
April 13, 1992.)
"Being a scholar athlete takes more than brains and brawn. It takes time and effort. Endurance and commitment. It's a student who can stay in midair for 2.5 seconds while shooting a lay-up and an athlete who knows which law of physics keeps him there."
Physicist's comments: Gee, I wish I knew how a student could stay mid air for 2.5 seconds. That's 1.25 seconds on the way up, and 1.25 seconds on the way down. So the student would have to jump 7.6 meters up (25 vertical feet) to stay mid air that long! For comparison, Michael Jordan's hang time is 1.0 second.
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A speed of gravity.
(The
Philadelphia Inquirer, reprinted in The Southern Illinoisan,
January 19, 2003.)
"Einstein predicted that if the universe behaved as he figured, gravity would travel at the speed of light. Most physicists agree.
At the meeting in Seattle of the American Astronomical Society, scientists announced the first huge-scale attempt to measure the "propagation speed of gravity" in the universe (not the speed of acceleration here on Earth - that's the familiar 32 feet per second)."
Physicist's comments: There is no such thing as the "speed of acceleration". Obviously, the reporter confused the speed, with which gravity propagates through the space, with the acceleration the gravity causes when bodies fall near the surface of Earth, that is 32 feet per second per second (32 ft/s2).