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By Root 1976 0

it at exactly the right speed; a one per cent error and gravity will make you look bad. Three-point shooters, whether they know it or not, compensate for aerodynamic drag. Each successive bounce of a dropped basketball is nearer to the ground because of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Daryl Dawkins or Shaquille O’Neal shattering a backboard is an opportunity for teaching - among some other things - the propagation of shock waves. A spin shot off the glass from under the backboard goes in because of the conservation of angular momentum. It’s an infraction of the rules to touch the basketball in ‘the cylinder’ above the basket; we’re now talking about a key mathematical idea: generating n-dimensional objects by moving (n - l)-dimensional objects.

In the classroom, in newspapers and on television, why aren’t we using sports to teach science?

When I was growing up, my father would bring home a daily paper and consume (often with great gusto) the baseball box scores. There they were, to me dry as dust, with obscure abbreviations (W, SS, K, W-L, AB, RBI), but they spoke to him. Newspapers everywhere printed them. I figured maybe they weren’t too hard for me. Eventually I too got caught up in the world of baseball statistics. (I know it helped me in learning decimals, and I still cringe a little when I hear, usually at the very beginning of the baseball season, that someone’s ‘batting a thousand’. But 1.000 is not 1,000.. The lucky player is batting one.)

Or take a look at the financial pages. Any introductory material? Explanatory footnotes? Definitions of abbreviations? Almost none. It’s sink or swim. Look at those acres of statistics! Yet people voluntarily read the stuff. It’s not beyond their ability. It’s only a matter of motivation. Why can’t we do the same with maths, science and technology?

In every sport the players seem to perform in streaks. In basketball it’s called the hot hand. You can do no wrong. I remember a play-off game in which Michael Jordan, not ordinarily a superb long-range shooter, was effortlessly making so many consecutive

three-point baskets from all over the floor that he shrugged his shoulders in amazement at himself. In contrast, there are times when you’re cold, when nothing goes in. When a player is in the groove he seems to be tapping into some mysterious power, and when ice-cold he’s under some kind of jinx or spell. But this is magical, not scientific thinking.

Streakiness, far from being remarkable, is expected, even for random events. What would be amazing would be no streaks. If I flip a penny ten times in a row, I might get this sequence of heads and tails: H H H T H T H H H H. Eight heads out of ten, and four in a row! Was I exercising some psychokinetic control over my penny? Was I in a heads groove? It looks much too regular to be due to chance.

But then I remember that I was flipping before and after I got this run of heads, that it’s embedded in a much longer and less interesting sequence: H T H T T H H H T H T H H H H T H T T H T H T T. If I’m permitted to pay attention to some results and ignore others, I’ll always be able to ‘prove’ there’s something exceptional about my streak. This is one of the fallacies in the baloney detection kit, the enumeration of favourable circumstances. We remember the hits and forget the misses. If your ordinary field goal shooting percentage is 50 per cent and you can’t improve your statistics by an effort of will, you’re exactly as likely to have a hot hand in basketball as I am in coin-flipping. As often as I get eight out of ten heads, you’ll get eight out of ten baskets. Basketball can teach something about probability and statistics, as well as critical thinking.

An investigation by my colleague Tom Gilovich, professor of psychology at Cornell, shows persuasively that our ordinary understanding of the basketball streak is a misperception. Gilovich studied whether shots made by NBA players tend to cluster more than you’d expect by chance. After making one or two or three baskets, players were no more likely to succeed than after a missed