The 100m record in year 2100 will be 9.56s
By MUNGAI KIHANYA
The Sunday Nation
Nairobi,
28 September 2008
During the recently concluded
Beijing Olympics, Mike Nginye noted that several world records were
broken. He further notes that records are broken almost every time these
games take place. Thus he asks;
“If this trend is maintained, how long will it take Man to run 100
meters in zero time? And is this possible?”
The simple answer is never! And
there are two reasons for this: First it is impossible for any object to
be at two places at the same time. If runner finished a race in zero
time, then he would be at the starting and finishing lines
simultaneously… and that is physically (and logically) impossible.
The second reason is that even
though new records are set in each round of the games, the improvements
from the previous times are getting smaller. Thus a time will come when
it will be almost impossible to run any faster than a certain limiting
speed.
So, the question is not when a
person will run 100 metres in zero seconds but, rather, when this
limiting speed will be reached…and what its value is.
The first 100m world record was
10.6s set in 1912, then followed 10.4s in 1921, an improvement of 0.2s.
The next one was 10.3s in 1930 and from there all other improvements
were in steps of only 0.1s up to 9.9s in 1968.
From that year onwards, the
timings were done electronically and recorded in hundredths of a second.
Thus in 1968, another world record was entered at 9.95s and after that
the next one was 9.93s in 1988 – and improvement of only 0.02s (two
hundredths of a second)!
Since the beginning of
electronic timing 40 years ago, the total improvement in the 100m record
is only 0.26s – about a quarter of a second! For comparison, in the
first 40 years of records, the total improvement was half a second.
Thus we can safely assume that
the improvements will reduce by half every century. In other words, in
the next 100 years, we should expect the record for 100m to be bettered
by only about an eighth of a second (0.125s). That is, by the year 2100,
it will be around 9.56s.
***
Mike also wanted
to know what formula phone companies use to ensure that users can’t
dial-in a random number and load airtime credit without paying. The
answer is simply by using a very many digits and limiting the number of
times subscribers are allowed to try.
My provider uses 14 digits thus
the probability of getting a valid number is one in one hundred
trillion! I am allowed three trials and that cuts the probability to one
in thirty trillion.
Even if a lucky person entered a
matching code for sh10,000 credit, it will be a very rare occurrence and
the phone company can take the loss!
 |
 |