For those who don’t want to leave sea level to train, you can acquire a portable hyperbaric chamber to simulate altitude.

Indeed (and I’ve often wondered why this is not considered as unfair as using a performance-enhancing drug…)

I think it’s debatable as to how much difference it actually makes if you train in, say, Aspen and then compete at sea level. And it’s rather difficult to enforce, since if you said “nobody who trains in Aspen can compete” you would be discriminating against athletes who are genuinely from Aspen.

Interestingly, for a long time, caffeine was considered a performance-enhancing drug in rowing races in the UK, and it’s use was banned during/prior to races. I think that is no longer the case.

–IP

…but has anyone tried flying though? Heat vision?*

-cvj

*P.S. (Ahem… I’m joking here and in the previous comment. Superman riff… red sun vs yellow sun, Krypton vs Earth, and so forth.)

Shouldn’t you have superpowers when you’re down at sea level, with all that extra oxygen and thicker atmosphere? Maybe running super fast for really long… maybe being able to fly…. you know, the standard ones. Have you tried? Worth checking. You never know.

Yes, sort of. Many athletes train at high elevation. This makes them produce more haemoglobin. So when they then compete at or near sea level, they respire more (since usually the limiting factor for respiration is the amount of oxygen that can be transported around the body) and thus produce more energy.

–IP

Thanks. That’s a common misunderstanding of what we do. What makes a physical science field like physics work is computations - all of that business with calculations (including checking that your computations conventions are internally consistent) is vital to the field.

Frankly “Good ideas” are a dime a dozen. Anyone in my field ought to be able to think of at least six of them before breakfast. What makes a good idea go from a good idea to an idea that actually is useful and relevant is those several hours of muddling away with computations and calculations, testing out the idea and seeing how it fits into the scheme of things, and how it fits into the larger tapestry which is all the calculations that have ever been done in physics for generations. You can’t just make up stuff out of whole cloth, you see. Sitting around dreaming or talking is important to do too, but it is all utterly worthless (as science) without calculation. This is vital to what makes what I do science, at the end of the day. Finally, if I were working on an aspect of the subject that was directly related to a physical phenomenon “out there” in the world (this project is not so directly related, as far as I know, it is more about what’s going on “under the hood” of string theory), then the value of the good idea and the computation is also tested by comparison to a well-designed experiment, which has its own sequence of stages of ideas and computations (and worrying about conventions) to go through to bring it to fruition.

Thanks,

-cvj

-cvj

-cvj

Ok.. back to physics!

Cheers,

-cvj