JoinScience 101: What makes a curveball curve?
Ah, springtime, and young people’s thoughts turn to … baseball, of course. But this column is not about how to throw a curveball, so you’ll have to look that up on your own. Here the focus is on the why of the curveball. There are two different things that cause a spinning ball to curve. One is known as the Bernoulli effect and the other is known as the Magnus effect. The Bernoulli effect is the easiest to understand, so we begin with that, even though the Magnus effect is the dominant one in causing a ball to curve.