F is for Fisicks

We fancy ourselves as an amateur physicist. This is mainly based on the fact that we used to enjoy reading about the Manhattan Project and we once read a really good biography on Richard Feynman. Anyway, we went to a lecture on the physics of football yesterday. Turns out, the guy is a big Feynman fan. ANYWAY, we had to file a report elsewhere, and this is pretty much it...

Dr. Tim Gay is known as the guy responsible for the largest physics classes ever taught. Those classes, which were very short, were held at Memorial Stadium in Lincoln, Neb. Gay is a faculty member at the University of Nebraska, where football is Everything and where the N on the helmets stands for Nowledge.

Gay wanted to give some of those nowledgeable, rabid football fans an introduction to physics -- so he made a series of really short, very funny videos that were displayed on the jumbo-tron during Nebraska home games. In this way, he subjected more than 70,000 people at a time to lessons on things like momentum, force and pressure.

Gay also wrote a book: The Physics of Football. (The forward to the book was written by New England Patriots' coach Bill Belichick.) Yesterday, Gay gave a guest lecture on football physics in Missouri.

"It's important to relate scientific topics to something people really care about," Gay told those of us in the audience(which was somewhat smaller than 70,000 people).

During yesterday's lecture, Gay used a honeydew melon and a tall ladder to illustrate the pressure exerted on the human head upon contact during a football game. First, he put the melon in a modern football helmet and dropped it. The melon came out of the collision with the floor intact. Then he dropped a helmetless honeydew. The predictable result was messy, and Gay used the cracked melon to illustrate why it's important to wear a bike helmet.

Among other things, Gay also explained why you can kick a ball further in Denver than you can at sea level.

Before coming to Lincoln, Gay studied and worked at the University of Chicago and Yale. In college he played for a very bad football team at Cal Tech.

P.S. Though much smaller, yesterday's audience was decidedly more nowledgeable about physics than the crowds at Memorial Stadium.

P.P.S. We understand that in some places (probably Arkansas or St. Louis) the letter F stands for fisicks.

P.P.P.S. We like (and trust) offensive baseball stats. But we're sick and tired of eggheads trying to come up with metrics for baseball defense. The only way to evaluate a player's defensive ability is to WATCH a player play defense.