When Michael Jordan splashed onto the NBA scene in 1984, he didn't waste time racking up highlight after highlight — not to mention victim after victim — via his high-flying, hang-time dunks.
Winning back-to-back slam dunk contests from 1987-88, which included MJ's iconic, soaring dunk from the foul line, only propelled Jordan's stardom to new heights. The poster shot also wound up on the wall of every teenager trying to be like Mike. "Air" Jordan's early exploits also made fans stop and seriously wonder ..."Can MJ fly?"
Well, it turns out that two math educators sought out to answer that question nearly 30 years later. Andy Peterson and Zack Patterson derived an equation to figure out how long Jordan and some of his NBA peers can hang in the air, as reported by TED-Ed.
What they came back with was this hang time-calculating equation.
(Photo: TED-Ed)
In English: The height of a falling object above a surface is equal to the object's initial height from the surface plus its initial velocity, multiplied by how many seconds it has been in the air plus half the gravitational acceleration, multiplied by the square of the number of seconds spent in the air.
Got all that? Well, what they discovered when applying the derived equation is that Jordan's average hang time on dunks is comparable to that of notable NBA dunkers (Dominique Wilkins, Vince Carter) in that they're all under one second.
That's right, one second of hang time. They even crunched numbers to figure out the hang time of Jordan's 1988 foul-line dunk, and that, too, was under one second at 0.92 seconds. Wow, we would have guessed at least over a second, but then again, it sems like every time that dunk is replayed, it's in slow motion.
Peterson and Patterson even took hang time from that dunk and applied it to a game of basketball on the moon, determining that Jordan would have been able to dunk from halfcourt with that kind of gravity.
To see their mathematical genius in action, check out the video below.
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