This message comes from Rethinking, a podcast from TED. On Rethinking, organizational psychologist

Adam Grant talks to today's greatest minds about the ideas you might take for granted and what

assumptions you should reconsider. Find rethinking wherever you listen. You're listening to Shortwave

from NPR.

Football season is in full swing, shortwavers.

It's probably the physicist in me, but when I think of football,

I can't help but think of air resistance. All the different forces and laws of physics happening as the game plays out.

Not unlike Tim Gay.

As a physicist, I tend to look at everything I observe through a physics lens, and that held

true for football as well.

Tim's an experimental atomic physicist with a passion for football. And even as a high schooler,

Tim thought about the sport through a scientific lens when he wondered,

Why do they make the helmet that way? Why is the ball shaped that way?

But more than helmets or footballs, there was one elegant move to the game that he just couldn't stop thinking about.

These tight spiral passes and why balls sometimes in a punt, for example, why do they turn over sometimes

and why do they not turn over? You know the spiral pass? Those perfect throws where the football

leaves a player's hand and tightly spins as it arcs through the air. So as an adult, like any

physicist would, Tim looked to science for the

answers, but quickly realized that studying a seemingly simple part of the game, like the flight

of a ball through the air, raised loads of other questions.

On occasion, for example, in a kickoff, the ball will actually rise. If you were kicking a football in vacuum,

it would simply be a parabolic arc. But with air, again, you get interesting effects like

...