3264: 720 Ollie
| 720 Ollie |
 Title text: This discovery was key to his demonstration of regular/goofy symmetry violation, which won him gold in the theory portion of the X Games. |
Explanation
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This is one of 38 incomplete explanations: This page was created by BARRY BONDS THE BARYON. Don't remove this notice too soon. If you can fix this issue, edit the page! |
Tony Hawk tells Cueball that doing a single 360-degree spin causes him to land backward rather than forward. This is unexpected, since a 360-degree turn in the xy plane is a full revolution, meaning that it should return Tony Hawk to his original position. He further claims that doing a 720-degree spin causes him to land forward, which seems to imply that revolving 360*n degrees causes him to reverse orientation n times (so if n is even, then he returns to the same orientation, and if n is odd, he lands with the opposite orientation).
The caption reveals that this is because Tony Hawk is a spin-½ fermion. This explains the paradox, but is unusual because spin-½ particles are normally very small, only occurring in quantum physics rather than Newtonian physics. Since Tony Hawk is not a subatomic particle,[citation needed] it is unclear how his skateboard tricks could be described only by quantum physics.
A fermion is a classification of particles (or groups of particles) whose intrinsic angular momentum (aka "spin") is half-integer multiple of the reduced Planck constant, the behavior of these object's spin is described via spinors, a type of complex vector. This is in contrast to bosons, whose spin is an integer multiple of the reduced Planck constant, and described by the normal Euclidean vectors you know and love. [citation needed]
Transcript
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This is one of 30 incomplete transcripts: Don't remove this notice too soon. If you can fix this issue, edit the page! |
- Tony Hawk [holding a skateboard]: Something weird I've noticed is that if I do a 360 ollie, I land backward. I have to do a 720 to land going forward.
- [An illustration, above the heads of Tony Hawk and Cueball, depicts Tony Hawk doing two 360-degree turns on a skateboard]
- Caption: Tony Hawk discovers that he's a spin-½ fermion.
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Never really understood skateboards myself 216.25.182.141 03:00, 27 June 2026 (UTC)
- That's okay. I never really understood human-scale spin-½ fermions. 2603:8081:9700:1224:0:0:0:2 03:18, 27 June 2026 (UTC)
Early footage of Tony exploring rotational symmetries: The Loop (2001) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLC1V22Y7iY Note that he needs to go around the loop twice before he can return to his original orientation and land the trick. 86.23.176.63 03:39, 27 June 2026 (UTC)
Riding "regular" vs "goofy" just means which foot is placed at the front, it has no real effect on what you can or can't do so you could describe it as a "symmetry" similar to symmetries in physics. Discovering a way to break that symmetry would, in theory, be an important discovery to people who cared about theoretical skateboarding. Undergroundmonorail (talk) 04:37, 27 June 2026 (UTC)
"Tony Hawk is not a subatomic particle [citation needed]" XD 2401:4900:ADC9:33ED:3028:A249:ED24:CD91 07:00, 27 June 2026 (UTC)
Nevertheless Tony Hawk is awesome and can do anything a subatomic particle can do. Alas, the description (why a fermion differs from a boson) is not dumb enough for me to understand, tho. Dúthomhas (talk) 07:46, 27 June 2026 (UTC) Add comment
