Football Physics: The Science of the Game.

FOOTBALL PHYSICS: The Science of the Game

TIMOTHY GAY

The average Sunday-afternoon fan watches the events on the gridiron for the action, the athleticism, and maybe the really hard hits. But Gay, who has been both a collegiate football player at Caltech, and a professional physicist, watches for the Newtonian physics on display. He writes that a perfect example of Newton's first law of motion--which states that an object in motion stays in motion until met by an external force, and that the more massive the object, the more inclined it is to continue to move--is William "The Refrigerator" Perry, an occasional fullback for the Chicago Bears in the 1980s. The force that would stop the huge Perry would have to be formidable and well placed. In a collision between the relatively petite quarterback Doug Flutie and the massive defensive tackle Warren Sapp, the same force is exerted on each man, but Flutie gets pushed off his feet by Sapp's momentum. Examples such as this one help explain the dynamics of kicking, passing, and tackling and accounts for the effects of turf, padding, and crowd noise on players. This book is based on a series of televised science lectures that Gay did for the University of Nebraska and NFL Films. Rodale Pr Inc., 2004, 290 p., b&w photoss/illus., hardcover, $21.95.