Longest Basketball Shot
The video shows a guy throwing a basketball from the top of a tall tower to make a goal. Seems crazy impossible, but is it?
For this case, I first looked at two things. Was that a realistic shot in terms of distance and time of flight? Here is a plot of the ball from the video so that I can get an estimate of the time.
Since the distances and speeds aren’t what you would normally see with a basketball, I had to include air resistance. Here is a model of a ball using VPython.
From that computer simulation, I get similar times and velocities that are shown in the video. So from that aspect, it seems reasonable. But how likely is it? That is the real question. To answer this, I used the same computer simulation but varied in the starting velocity and angle of a ball in a likely realistic fashion.
Modeling 1000 throws from that position, here are the distances they would land from the center of the goal.
From this, only about 3 of 1000 shots would have made it in. Using a 3 out of 1000 chance as the probability of making a shot (and assuming each shot is independent) there would be a 70% chance of one goal after 400 shots. So, this seems doable.
Final Verdict: Pretty sure this is real. If you want all the details, here is part I and part II of the original analysis.
