Today is never before, cameras and other instruments that see are radically expanding

the limits of our vision and knowledge, and altering forever our image of the world.

Through the specialized eyes of cameras come new dimensions of seeing, which our eyes alone

could never discern.

In a world of motion, there is infinite detail too fast for the unaided eye.

In the 1870s an ingenious photographer, Edward Mybridge, invented a way to record movements

normally too quick to be seen.

A wager about the stride of a running horse brought Mybridge to the stock farm of a wealthy

Californian.

With a battery of 24 cameras that were activated by threads stretched across a track, Mybridge

captured aspects of motion that had never been witnessed before.

Mybridge's patron had bet that all four legs of a running horse were sometimes simultaneously

off the ground.

Stop action photography proved him to be right.

By projecting his photographs in rapid succession, the first motion pictures were born.

Much more than just a technical curiosity, Mybridge's pioneering work was the first

photographic analysis of the dynamics of physical motion.

Today, modern high-speed cameras can record rapid motion with a clarity that Edward Mybridge

could only have dreamed of.

Slow motion film is now a commonplace tool in analyzing athletic performance.

For Dr. Gideon Ariel, a physical education expert and a former discus drawer on the

Israeli Olympic team, slow motion film is just the first step in the scientific coaching

of athletes.

It is used to think that by looking on an athlete, they could tell what athlete does

right and what it does wrong.

Later on, they found out it's very complicated to start taking slow motion pictures.

But we find out, and coach is finding out, that even looking on a slow motion film, you

cannot tell what is right and what is wrong.

The reason is that in any movement, it's not what we see with our eyes that make the

difference, but the derivatives of what the IC, which is displacement, velocities,

accelerations, forces, we cannot see acceleration, we cannot see velocity.

It might appear fast or might appear slow, but the relationship of one segment to the

other in the body, we cannot see with our eyes.

Dr. Ariel has turned to the computer for aid in the analysis of movement.

Slow motion film of an athlete is projected frame by frame onto a recording screen.

Each touch of a sonic pen transmits into the computer memory, the dynamically changing

positions of the athlete's joints and limbs.

Human movement is governed by the same laws of motion that apply to the entire physical

world, and from the visual information contained in the film, the computer can rapidly calculate

the interrelationship of force, acceleration and velocity in the athlete's movements.

Computer-created images combined with a mass of numerical data can pinpoint where athletic

technique is hindering performance.

So what coaches in the past thought they can see with the eyes, we finding out you cannot

do.

You have to quantify.

With the advent of computers, we can provide the coaches with much more objective, reliable

information on how the body moves.

Dr. Ariel's computer analysis of Olympic discus thrower, Mac Wilkins, revealed that

useful energy which would affect his throw was being wasted on ground friction.

Additional force was being spent by not rigidly planting his forward leg at the moment of

the throw.

Based on this analysis, Wilkins altered his throwing technique.

Several months later in international competition, he threw the discus of a 13 feet farther than

he ever had before, and set a new world record.