Galileo's Bicycle, by Professor Freud

To the Editors of Velosophy

Dear Friends,

Please find enclosed my final draft of Galileo's Bicycle for inclusion in your magazine. I trust the small embarrassment at the Tour Down Under is now behind us. These things tend to happen when one gets over-excited. As you will see, I make light of it in my article.

GALILEO'S BICYCLE.

Did Galileo have a bicycle? No, we can be fairly certain he did not. This is merely an example of the free association of ideas, incidentally invented by myself. But that is by the way.

In what way is it an example of the free association of ideas? In this way. I was recently reading a book called Weighing the Soul, by Len Fisher. In it he describes how he once used a bicycle to demonstrate Galileo's laws of constant velocity and projectile motion.

He rode his bicycle at constant speed past his local pub, challenging onlookers to guess where a stone would land after he threw it straight up in the air. Thirty percent guessed that it would land behind him, but Mr Fisher's demonstration confirmed Galileo's prediction that it would keep moving forward at the same speed.

And how did this happen? In a most comical way. The stone landed directly on top of his head!

I myself have tried to reproduce this experiment, most recently at the Tour Down under, to the amusement onlookers, when the team I was part of was disqualified for throwing stones.

Nor was it a worthwhile exercise. My team mates refused to cooperate and did not throw their stones properly. Indeed, one of them was seen throwing his stone at a tree!

As a result of this, I have come up with a new and more modern way of testing Galileo's Laws, as they apply to Paintball.

Let us say you are firing your Paintball at a person jumping out of a tree. The question is, should you fire at the person, or should you fire below the person at the point where you expect him to be when the Paintball reaches the tree?

Are there any Paintball enthusiasts amongst the readers of Velosophy interested in a Paintball afternoon some time in the coming weeks? If you are, please let me know, through the editors. You may, of course, bring your bicycles. And perhaps we might organise a picnic.