Isaac Newton And The Motorcycle

Life at The Bat Cave was filled with precursors to and causes of my adult life. In hindsight, my love of reading, adventure, intelligence work, science, music, and my future as a minister of music could all be told from the year that we lived there. When I was about four years old, I learned about physics.

My friend and I were standing in the front yard, throwing rocks across the road. To a four-year-old arm, the tiny, almost-two-lane blacktop was an enormous distance from side to side. We thought that our throws were tremendous feats of athleticism, even though I doubt we ever got one all the way across. Suddenly, we had a problem. A motorcycle was coming down the street. To the best of my knowledge, it was the first motorcycle I had ever seen; but a motorcycle is something that you instinctively understand, because it looks like a bicycle. We knew that we shouldn't throw any rocks at the motorcycle. After all, throwing rocks at people was bad – this had been clearly explained at some point. Since I could see that the motorcycle rider was not the Joker, or the Penguin, or the Riddler, he had nothing to fear from riding down Batman's street, indeed, right in front of the Wayne Mansion. The only problem was how long it was taking for him to pass by us. It seemed that it took hours for that motorcycle to cover the hundred or so yards between Governor's Drive and my position in front of The Bat Cave. With a sudden insight, I realized that if I would throw my rock before he got to me, the rock would go across the road before the motorcycle got there! Brilliant! I threw the rock when the motorcycle was a good eight or ten feet to my left, and was astonished to watch the motorcycle drive into my rock as it flew across the street!. It seemed that the rock had somehow curved into the driver.

In 1966, there was a socially-agreed-upon response to kids who threw rocks at motorcycles. He stopped, knocked on the door to my house, and explained matters to my mother, who beat the tar out of me. Throughout the whole episode, I was trying to understand what had happened. I was mystified. If I threw the rock before the motorcycle got there, how did I manage to hit it? Eventually, I realized that the correct answer to this extraordinary physical conundrum was simple: Don't throw rocks when motorcycles are anywhere near because the moving motorcycle will run into the rock (I wasn't exactly a child prodigy physicist). I also generalized this to cars and bicycles (I was cautious).

It was my first exposure to Newtonian mechanics. And leading your target. And motorcycles.