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You're listening to shortwave from NPR.

Happy Super Bowl Shortor Waivers.

It's probably the physicist in me,

but when I think of football, I can't help but think about 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 observed 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? 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 arcsks 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,

...