ExploreLearning News : Books

Are you ready for some football?

American football is very popular. Kids can first play Pop Warner football. High schools all over the country have a game on Friday evenings. Colleges play hundreds of games on Saturday, and Monday Night Football is watched by millions every week. Physics (although not quite as popular) is taught to millions of students every year.

Do football and physics belong together? Should a football fan learn about physics? Should a physics student (or teacher) learn about football? For those that have any interest in either, I highly recommend Football Physics: The Science of the Game by Timothy Gay.

The book covers a broad range physics (and math) topics, including Newton's Laws, torque, and wave velocity to name just a few. The football topics ranged from the grass on the ground, to the ball at its highest point during a punt - and everything in between.

Early in the book the primary subject is Newton's Laws and the equations of motion. Dr. Gay writes,

These quantities - speed, velocity, and acceleration - are the elements that make up the branch of physics called kinematics, or the science of motion. Galileo was the first scientist to make a comprehensive study of kinematics.

In a later section,

Now is a good time to break away for a discussion of the difference between quickness and speed. Jerry Rice, at his peak, could run the 40 in about 4.6 seconds. That is not an incredible time - it's fairly typical for a wide receiver. What separates Rice from th pack of his peers is his ability to get open, and that has to do with quickness, only one aspect of the 40-yard time.

This aspect of distance, velocity, and acceleration can be investigated in our Distance-Time and Speed-Time Graphs Gizmo where you can quickly visualize the position of two people in a 40 yard dash. Which one would be better for a short passing game? Long passing game? Football Physics does a great job of going in to the practical application the data.

In the chapter that discusses the West Coast Offense there is a section on evasion strategies.

There's one final kinematics issue to consider that gives both offensive and defensive players an edge in the open field: chase strategies.

I found this section very interesting, since so much game programming is done to create aliens (or some other such creature) that can track you down. Although not quite as lively as a good alien chase, we have a Gizmo that can teach you the fundamentals of a one dimensional chase with the classic cat and mouse. Will the mouse be able to escape (score a touchdown), or not?

In a later chapter, the flight of the ball gets discussed (punting, kicking, and throwing). In the section on Punts and Parabolas the real world applications of parabolas mentioned.

We encounter parabolas all the time. A parabolic shape is ideal for focusing electromagnetic waves such as light or television signals. … microphone reflectors used by TV crews on the sidelines. Likewise, parabolic mirrors are used in astronomical telescopes to focus light rays coming from distant objects in to a lens …

Next time you think about a punt, think about a quadratic of the form ax² + bx + c. What was the sign of the a value? Positive or negative. For a bit of help, learn more with our Quadratics in Polynomial Form Gizmo.

As the discussion on the flight of the ball continues in Football Physics, air drag is considered. A lot of data is presented which shows that theory and observational data match up rather well. Although the Gizmo is one of the oldest, the Golf Range! Gizmo will let you look in to the effects of air drag. If you get a hole in one, you may here my voice.

The final chapter was entitled 'Waves in the Stadium' where concepts of sound and wave motion are investigated. I was fascinated by the discussion of fans "doing the wave."

The Wave phenomenon was first noticed internationally at the 1986 World Cup soccer competition in Mexico. For this reason it is often referred to as La Ola, or the Mexican Wave. [...] it did, in all likelihood, truly originate in Mexico, possibly as early as 1968 at the Olympic Games in Mexico.

Believe it or not, Dr. Gay obtained data at the University of Nebraska stadium, and determined the speed of the wave as a function of temperature! I had never thought about this before. The wave speed of humans can be modelled as an ideal gas. For an ideal gas, all molecules will stop moving at absolute zero (-491^oF). Human waves also have an absolute zero value. Can you estimate what that value may be? Guess you will have to read the book to find out, at least until we build a Gizmo about it! Stay tuned for a few new Gizmos as the football playoffs approach.

If you would like to learn more about Dr. Tim Gay and his nuclear physics research (I was also a nuclear guy in graduate school!) at the University of Nebraska, visit his website, or drop by his Football Physics site.

Mathletes Book

In recent Washington Post Book World, Joel Achenbach favorably reviews Count Down : Six Kids Vie for Glory at the World's Toughest Math Competition by Steve Olson:

… a remarkably engaging little book that demystifies math and probably ought to be read by anyone living in a technological society. Heck, anyone with a brain could get inspiration here. …

[Olson] shows that mathematical wizardry is not a supernatural gift but an extension of normal everyday cognition. There are no miracles here. The young math prodigies of the narrative are like every Olympic athlete, training themselves to achieve at a dazzling level. They might start with abundant natural talent, but taking that talent to the highest level requires hard work…

Sounds great. I'm adding it to my summer reading list.

Art and Science

Last week I saw a story about a Hubble image being compared to the van Gogh painting "The Starry Night." I couldn't help but think about a book I read a few years ago called Art & Physics by Leonard Shlain which begins:

Art and physics are a strange coupling. Of the many human disciplines, could there be two that seem more divergent? The artist employs image and metaphor; the physicist uses number and equation. Art encompasses an imaginative realm of aesthetic qualities; physics exists in a world of crisply circumscribed mathematical relationships between quantifiable properties.