With his computers, movie cameras, electronic pens, and boundless enthusiasm, Gideon Ariel helps athletes become world champions

By AL BARKOW

cuac Bashevis Singer once wrote,

"He who sees, sees slow." While the Nobel Prize winner was thinking along philosophic lines, suggesting that to better understand ourselves and our world we must not hurry into judgment, Gideon Ariel surely agrees, and as a man of science, literally proves Singer's thought.

Ariel's work is the study of physical motion-how the body functions when walking, running, jumping, throwing, kicking, hitting-and finding ways, through the use of high-speed photography and computer technology, to improve man's performance. His main concentration, not surprisingly, is on sports. That may seem frivolous compared to the search for inner peace or a cure for the common cold, except that most of us do take our game-playing rather seriously. Furthermore, it can be argued that Ariel's "vision" touches on deeper concerns than simply the improvement of athletic pursuit; while extending our visual perceptions of the physical world he also challenges some commonly held beliefs about how the human body functions.

Ariel's essential premise is that the human eye cannot see everything that happens to the body while in motion, much less quantify the physical forces of all the working parts involved. He's also shown that the eye can be deceived by what it does see, and in turn, it can deceive the mind. For example, one would think that of two hockey players in similar physical condition, the bigger of the two would be able to hit a faster, harder shot, because big men usually hit sweep shots (the stick hits only the puck, sweeping it toward the net), while

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USAIR MAGAZINE October 1980