Physics of ?The Hit? »
Posted By bruhaha 10 months, 4 weeks ago in SportsIsaac Newton’s apple hurt considerably less than Ryan Clark’s coconut. But they did have a few things in common.
Clark’s shockingly violent hit on the Baltimore Ravens’ Willis McGahee two Sundays ago — a full-speed, helmet-to-helmet crash that left McGahee unconscious and Clark all but — didn’t just follow the N.F.L.’s rules, but Newton’s as well. Force equaled mass times acceleration. Momentum was conserved. And the bodies finally came to rest, McGahee’s on a stretcher.
“How I look at it, you can be the hammer or the nail,” the inner scientist in Clark explained this week. “I try to be the hammer.”
The tackle, the art of making the ball carrier not stay in motion, is football’s most primeval action. Amusing physicists the way batting averages do actuaries, collisions lead the highlight reels, impart the force of a deadly car crash, and rely upon kinematics that date to a considerably different big bang..
Read Full Story at nytimes.com »
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bruhaha
Geologist at an environmental consulting and engineering company here in the Chicago suburbs.
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