Tag: The Invisible Hand
The Invisible Hand: how do brushes affect the stone’s path in olympic curling?
At the Winter Olympics, few sights are as mesmerizing—and, to the uninitiated, as baffling—as the sport of curling. A 44-pound granite stone's glides silently across a sheet of ice, its path curving gracefully as two athletes furiously sweep the surface in front of it with what appear to be high-tech brooms. To the casual viewer, the sweeping might look like a frantic, desperate attempt to clean the ice. But to curlers, the brush is an instrument of precision, a tool capable of fundamentally altering the trajectory of the stone . The question is not just why they sweep, but how brushes can so dramatically…