Sigh. I just saw Michael Phelps break another World Record. It’s a bit like putting some toast in the toaster and KNOWING it will come out toasty. Except this piece of toast goes really fast and has funny ears.
But it got me thinking…
If every year - or every four years - a bunch of World Records are broken (in, for example, swimming or athletics) … won’t we, eventually, get to some critical minimum point where records can no longer be broken … where we simply run out of milliseconds to cut off?
For example, in a 100 m freestyle or sprinting event, how long can world records keep getting broken, before it reaches some sort of critical point of impossibility? I don’t know. These records are generally only broken by miliseconds, so I guess it could take a while to shave it down … perhaps by 2400?
This is is a bit of a daft concern, because it assumes that the world will still exist as we know it in 2400, which, environmentally speaking, is looking less and less likely. Still, I like the idea that a world record can get shortened and shortened to the point where it almost
… disappears
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1 The Michael Phelps drinking game « out of curiosity // Aug 14, 2008 at 4:30 pm
[...] thinks it gets old (see her post here, and its terrific graphic I’ll refrain from stealing: http://fnewsmagazine.com/untitled/2008/08/11/world-records/). I like my roommate’s idea that world records will become shorter and shorter until they [...]