Like, is there going to be a point where someone sets the *final* record for the 100m and no amount of training, sports science, or equipment innovation will help athletes go any faster? If so, how close do you think we are to someone hitting that limit?
In: Biology
There won’t be such a point, at least theoretically.
A typical mathematical model of record-setting has performance getting closer and closer to some unknown limit of human potential. The improvement of each successive record is – typically – smaller and smaller.
But as long as we can measure such small differences, we can keep detecting improvements.
Mathematically this is called an ‘asymptote’ – a line on a chart that gets closer and closer to some limit but never quite reaches it. So it allows for infinite progression of improvement without ever breaching what is possible.
Now obviously the real world is not a mathematical model. One day humanity will disappear and record attempts with it. There are tiny lengths beneath which we cannot reliably measure as a law of physics. Infinity is not truly available to us.
But to all intents and purposes we can keep record-setting for a long time.
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