With Super Bowl XV just days away, University of Nebraska-Lincoln's Tim Gay will be featured on the Feb. 7 episode of NPR's “Short Wave” podcast, delving into the age-old mysteries of football physics. did. In the case of a pass, why does the front edge of a soccer ball follow the trajectory of the ball, pointing up when it's launched and pointing down by the time it reaches the receiver?
Gay, Willa Cather, professor of physics and author of “Football Physics: The Science of the Game,'' was introduced to this book by his friend and Nobel Prize winner Bill Phillips after a lecture Gay gave in 2000. When I was asked about the conundrum, I was first intrigued by this tight spiral conundrum.
“I've been to many meetings with Bill, so I knew that if he stood up and asked a question, the chairman probably would have messed something up,” Gay told NPR. “So I was a little shocked.”
Gay racked his brain for an answer, but finally said, “I don't know!” Thus began a 20-year quest.
NPR reports that Gay found papers on the subject, but none told the full story. He enlisted the help of two other physicists, Richard Price of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and William Moss of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
“For the next three years, we yelled at each other on Zoom about this problem,” the Husker physicist said.
One day, Gay began to wonder about torque, the amount of force that rotates an object. “It looks like the ball is leaning down” on the forward pass, he said.
After theoretical calculations and computer simulations, researchers determined that the answer lies in a combination of air resistance and gyroscope effects. A paper detailing this discovery was published as an editor's choice in the American Journal of Physics in September 2020. Click here to learn more about the research.
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