NFL Asks Columbia University For Help With Deflate-Gate 239
An anonymous reader writes with news that the NFL has reached out for some help answering the questions raised by deflate-gate. "Yep, it's for real. The law firm representing the NFL (Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison) has reached out to Columbia University's department of physics to recruit an expert on 'gas physics' to help determine, as has been reported, the 'environmental impacts on inflated footballs.' This is one of those rare times when the jocks turn to the nerds, so fellow fans of molecules and momentum — climb out of that gym locker you were stuffed into — this is our moment. Stand tall. And do the wave....They want to talk to a physicist, I presume, to help determine if a drop in temperature — a slowing of the air molecules inside the football — can explain the low pressure that was found in some of the balls used in the A.F.C. championship game two weeks ago between the New England Patriots and the Indianapolis Colts."
It's not the gas... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's not the gas... (Score:4, Interesting)
The NFL has plenty of experience in dealing with inflating footballs. It's pretty hard to believe that they don't understand what's going on. They should be well aware of the effects of cooling on both the ball and the air inside it. It's not like they recently started using inflated leather balls.
Re:It's not the gas... (Score:5, Insightful)
So, I said that the behavior of gasses is well understood and you responded with the ideal gas law. Are you agreeing or disagreeing with me? If you are agreeing, then why post?
Next you mentioned the the NFL has a bunch of experience with this. Yet, it is the NFL that is asking for help. Obviously they don't agree with you.
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i solved this issue on day one. they injected hot gas into the football right before the pressure was measured. pressure was fine with the hot gas, but once the gas reached ambient temperature the pressure was lower. Using the ideal gas law I calculated the gas would need to be 30 C (about 55 F) hotter than ambient. Completely feasible.
science, bitches!
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i solved this issue on day one. they injected hot gas into the football right before the pressure was measured. pressure was fine with the hot gas, but once the gas reached ambient temperature the pressure was lower. Using the ideal gas law I calculated the gas would need to be 30 C (about 55 F) hotter than ambient. Completely feasible.
science, bitches!
I'm willing to bet that you used 2 PSI in your calculations as that is what was initially leaked as the pressure difference for all of the footballs. There have been further leaks saying that only the intercepted ball, the one in possession of the Colts, was 2 PSI low. The rest were supposedly under 1 PSI low.
http://www.businessinsider.com... [businessinsider.com]
Based on the information from Billichick, it's likely that at least one of the footballs, if not more, were roughed up (which is what they do the prepare the football
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the problem is, with the rubber bladder and then the leather outside, the football won't feel noticeably warmer immediately
Re:It's not the gas... (Score:5, Insightful)
The NFL is not interested in a scientific answer. They are interested in an answer from a supposed authority which reaches a conclusion they agree with. The NFL can then take that answer and champion it as having been "verified by scientists!".
The NFL wants this whole mess to go away. They do not want people thinking that the players and teams cheat because people will become less invested in a rigged game. And if that happens, the NFL makes less money.
What the NFL is really asking is for some scientist to come forward with an explanation about how the Patriot's footballs can be slightly deflated while the other team's balls remained pert and bouncy. Whether the scientist involved provides a legitimate answer or not is inconsequential, so long as it sounds convincing.
So, yeah, once again the jocks are trying to crib off the hard work of the nerds.
It's more than Ideal Gas laws (Score:2)
Yes we all know about PV=nRT. But it's not just the pressure P and T that are changing in the equation. Why not also consider the rubber bladder, leather and stiched seams. Rubber and other un-oriented polymers Expand when chilled. the stitching threads are oriented to they should compress when chilled. My guess is the leather will expand too. So the pressure could drop just from the ball's volume increasing not just a constant.
Finally no one seems to consider an even easier way the balls could get de
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No. rubber expands in the cold.
Classic science fair project & shrinky dinks (Score:2)
The coefficient of expansion has nothing to do with this. The volume of rubber does increase when heated. But that doesn't determine how the elasticity behaves.
It's a classic science fair project to stretch rubber or polyethylene and then heat it. the student's expectation is the band will stretch but it contracts with heat. Same with polyethylene and shrinky dinks in the toaster.
http://agpa.uakron.edu/p16/les... [uakron.edu]
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OK, so I guess I'm wrong, the NFL has no experience with inflating footballs. There are multiple balls inflated for each of the many games each week throughout the season and this has been going on for quite a few years, but they still don't really know anything about inflated leather balls. Right.
They asked for the help, that's the point of the article. If they were confident in their conclusions, this thread wouldn't exist in its current form. I am not making some wild assumption that they don't know what they are doing - the NFL asked for help.
I realized that they probably only asked for help because they wanted to get a response from someone with an un-assailable reputation, not because they are buffoons. But, it still happened, and pointing out that they know what they are doing does not advance
Re:It's not the gas... (Score:4, Informative)
Air is NOT an ideal gas at ALL. You can't use the ideal gas law and have it work.
However you are in luck though since engineers made tables long ago of air properties at a huge range of temperatures, pressures etc and you can just look up the properties of air. However the properties of the material of the football would have to be tested.
The only time you can use the ideal gas law is with a nearly pure gas at high temperature and no chemical reactions.
It does suck that so much of the stuff we teach people in chemistry is not actually useful.
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Dry air behaves ideally until several atmospheres at reduced temperatures well above one, we're talking about 2 atmospheres. Ideal assumption would be fine unless there is humidity. If there is humidity in the air, it gets a little more complicated; you'd have to subtract out the vapor fraction that may condense.
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The ideal gas law is useable at all temperatures, except you consider 30 degrees Kelvin a high temperature.
The properties of the hull, in this case the skin of the ball are irrelevant. The 'volume' of the skin is the thickness times area. It is related to the enclosed volume inside of the skin by a factor of r^3.
So sinking temperature lets first of all shrink the volume of the skin and not the volume of the sphere it surrounds.
Actually a no brainer if you ever had held a ball used for sports in your hands.
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Dry air is within 1 part in 1000 of the ideal gas law at near ambient pressure and temperature. I challenge you to detect this with portable instrumentation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C... [wikipedia.org]
Unless the football is extremely elastic or is strongly adsorbent of gasses the ball properties wont matter much at all.
The interesting question is do they use dry air? If they use ambient air, compressing it to ~13 psi will increase the dew point by ~10C / 18F. If the dew point is now above ambient, moisture will cond
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Yes, let's fire balls at jocks' heads and see what the effect of varying the environmental parameters is.
Test Lab, not a University (Score:2)
Commercial test labs do this type of work on a daily basis. Not rocked sciense, so don't know what a University offers.
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Not rocked sciense, so don't know what a University offers.
Lot's of underpaid grad students = low consulting fees.
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Maybe they can find someone who can spell "rocket science"....
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Hey, /. commentators don't necessarily know how to spell things right. We aren't all rocket surgeons!
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You've got it all wrong. Tree branches are gnarly, not fish.
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You've got it all wrong. Tree branches are gnarly, not fish.
He meant narwhally. Which is still not fish, but closer.
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I doubt there are commericial test labs that test no brainers.
Customer: "Dude, if we put this kettle of water on a flame of gas, would it become warmer?"
Tester: "No idea, but we can set up a test environment and do some tests! Wanna pay for it?"
yep. Columbia's to authoritatively say what we kno (Score:5, Insightful)
Agreed. Anyone can put a football out in the cold, or in a refrigerator, and see what happens. Columbia's role is credibility, to authoratively say how much pressure drop is attributable to temperature.
requires record-breaking barometric pressure (Score:2)
As you noted, the altitude of the locker room is effectively the same as the field, so altitude would not be a factor. You made me curious about barometric pressure, so I looked it up. The highest-ever recorded pressure was less than 1 PSI above standard pressure, so even a record-breaking barometer reading wouldn't explain it.
Why Not Ask a 9-Year-Old Who Plays Basketball? (Score:2)
Every 9-year-old kid who plays basketball outside in winter can tell the NFL that temperature affects air pressure [yahoo.com]. Whether this is the sole factor at work here, is another question.
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The fact that warm air expands is well known. The question is whether this is actually a possible explanation for the observed facts.
Still Doesn't Explain... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Still Doesn't Explain... (Score:4, Informative)
why the other team's game balls remained properly inflated...given they were undergoing similar circumstances (weather, handling, use, etc).
Properly inflated /= experienced no deflation. The Colt's footballs could have experienced deflation and still met the 12.5 psi limit if they were inflated at the high-end of the range to start. This of course assumes that the leaks regarding the Colts footballs are correct, the initial report of 11/12 Pats game balls being 2 psi under the limit have been contradicted by the repots, including a report this morning that only 1 ball was 2 psi under the lime (the ball handled by the Colts' staff), a few balls were about 1 psi under the limit, and the rest were just a "tic" below 12.5 psi.
They also weren't necessarily undergoing similar circumstances" - the Pats' balls were used more and it could be that the Colts (as a dome team) were more concerned about keeping the balls dry than the Patriots were (homer speculation on my part).
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That depends. Were they both inflated under the same conditions, too? Maybe the "under-inflated" balls were inflated with warm air indoors, and the "properly inflated" balls had been inflated outside in the cold air. Or were they even just inflated an hour apart in changing weather conditions?
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If they were over-inflated, you'd think the officials who checked the footballs before the game would have mentioned that by now.
Don't forget weight (mass) (Score:2)
I'm not a football fan but one cannot avoid hearing about "deflategate"
However my understanding is that they both measure the pressure and the weight of the ball. The temperature difference will account for the pressure decrease however the balls should still weigh the same. The claims were what - 11 of the balls were underweight?
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The claim is that 11 out of the 12 footballs provided by New England were deflated AFTER they had been checked by the NFL officials.
A few hours before the game starts, the officials check the footballs provided by both teams to make sure they are properly inflated. (Proper inflation is between 12.5 and 13.5 PSI.)
The footballs are then held by the officials until prior to the game, where they are handed over to the equipment managers for each team to take to that team's sideline area.
Now, at halftime, the of
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Interrogator: Sir, you contend that you did not knowingly inflate those footballs with heated air?
Equipment Manager: Well, I didn't know it would be a problem. I always wondered why our air compressor was hooked up to the furnace.
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Besides the "ideal gas law, of PV =nRT" [wikipedia.org], the act of checking the pressure leaks some air out of the ball.. Those valves aren't perfect, same with the gauges..
This happens to me all the time with my mountain bike tires. Each time you measure, some air leaks out and it's a couple PSI less the next time you remeasure a few seconds later.
Lastly, The temperature of the air filling the ball might have been substantially elevated above room temp by the compressor. I.E. Heat of compression, combined with waste
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Deflate-gate? (Score:2, Insightful)
Where do I go to complain about people sticking "-gate" onto the end of every scandal?
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Where do I go to complain about people sticking "-gate" onto the end of every scandal?
Get the media to do some items on Gategate?
Re:Deflate-gate? (Score:4, Funny)
Sign the gategate petition to get the FBI to look into it.
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If you're Republican-oriented, tired of having every scandal called back to Watergate, you can always use the alternate name: "BallGhazi"
How do you measure your balls?
If they stick a pin into the football to measure the pressure, it'll let out a little air each time.
If they measure at a lower temperature than when the ball was inflated, they'll get a lower pressure.
How do you blow up your balls?
Re:Deflate-gate vs. Ballghazi? (Score:2)
Oh, I don't think you have to be a Republican to appreciate how well "Ballghazi" just rolls off the tongue.
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But then it transpired that there were no differences and the prices being charged and that the opposing fans had cooked up the whole thing to cause problems for the local team, so form the next week the papers were full of the gategategate.
Then a whistleblower uncovered evidence to show that there was a di
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Where do I go to complain about people sticking "-gate" onto the end of every scandal?
Hmmm... If there was another scandal at the Watergate Hotel, would we call it Watergategate?
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The origin. [wikipedia.org]
The Watergate scandal was a major political scandal that occurred in the United States in the 1970s as a result of the June 17, 1972, break-in at the Democratic National Committee (DNC) headquarters at the Watergate office complex in Washington, D.C., and the Nixon administration's attempted cover-up of its involvement.
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We all know where it originates from. Doesn't change the fact that sticking -gate onto the end of every scandal's name is utterly stupid.
It doesn't even make sense. It's not like the Watergate scandal had anything to do with water.
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We all don't know. Some of us are too young to read.
MIT? (Score:4, Interesting)
It's not Jocks asking Nerds (Score:2)
It's Sports Nerds asking Science Nerds. Doesn't make any of them less nerdy.
The Wave? (Score:3)
If you're doing the Wave, you deserve to get stuffed back in that locker. Or worse.
As far as Deflate Gate goes, in the end it won't matter. The Hawks are going to walk all over the Pats. The only real question is whether they'll hit any of the numbers I drew in our office pool.
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The Hawks are going to walk all over the Pats. The only real question is whether they'll hit any of the numbers I drew in our office pool.
Well obviously my Slashdot account must've been hacked or something...
Ideal gas law (Score:2)
It takes an expert in "gas physics" to explain the ideal gas law to them? Didn't these lawyers have to take a basic physics or chemistry course in their undergrad coursework?
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Well thank goodness some random Internet commenter is here to set us straight. I'm glad you're smarter than those dummies at Columbia University.
Re: Ideal gas law (Score:2)
That's PV = nRT, you insensitive clod!
Leave momentum and differential acceleration out of this petty spat.
NFL is just looking for an excuse (Score:5, Insightful)
The National Felons League (an organization of Billionaire Team Owners that is considered non-profit so that it pays no taxes) is just looking for an excuse here. The patriots were laughed at when they tried to pull the temperature excuse out of their ass, so they want a University to back up the "pressure goes down with temperature" excuse. They need to do this because even die hard Patriot fans are not buying the "a locker room attendant did this all on his own" story. And lets completely ignore why this supposed temperature drop affected only one teams footballs and not those provided by the other team, or why the problem was only observed when the opposition intercepted a ball and not by any of the Patriot players as they handled the balls.
Re:NFL is just looking for an excuse (Score:4, Interesting)
You fail basic logic here. It's obvious the NFL is not looking for an excuse, they are looking for "real scientists" to back up their already-made rejection of the already-made excuse from the Patriots. The last thing anybody in this case looking for an excuse would do would be to hire physicists.
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The National Felons League (an organization of Billionaire Team Owners that is considered non-profit so that it pays no taxes) is just looking for an excuse here. The patriots were laughed at when they tried to pull the temperature excuse out of their ass, so they want a University to back up the "pressure goes down with temperature" excuse. They need to do this because even die hard Patriot fans are not buying the "a locker room attendant did this all on his own" story. And lets completely ignore why this supposed temperature drop affected only one teams footballs and not those provided by the other team, or why the problem was only observed when the opposition intercepted a ball and not by any of the Patriot players as they handled the balls.
It turns out that it's not just a locker room attendant but... an elderly locker room attendant..... Those old guys, they are always up to something nefarious....
http://www.nfl.com/news/story/... [nfl.com]
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not just a locker room attendant but... an elderly locker room attendant
Well, I bet he'll never work again.
Nor need to.
What about barometric pressure? (Score:2)
What was the local barometric pressure doing over the course of that same time period? Pressure inside a football is relative - to the pressure of the air outside the football.
If you combine temperature's effect on air pressure, a local increase in barometric pressure, and possibly some effect of the temp/humidity change from locker room to field, who knows what the range of change is. Experiments will certainly be the best way to figure that out.
combination of things (Score:3)
It didn't make any difference to the outcome of the game but it still persists. The NFL has rules governing the inflation... yada yada
1) It could have been the cold.
2) It could have been that New England knowingly under-inflated the footballs and played the first half of the game knowing it.
3) It could have been a mistake on New England's equipment folks, shit happens.
Chose one of three because it didn't make any difference in the outcome because once the officiating crew check them at half-time they detected it and changed the pressure. If there was a question to a violation of the rules it should have been brought out then by the refs, but they didn't do it and that's a bad problem here. Sure pressure can change, fuck the damn things can leak, it was the cold, an earthquake .. whatever the reason it's over and this countless going back and forth isn't going to change things but it may eventually give the NFL a scapegoat. Belichick is still in the dog house over the videotape episode because he didn't follow through with the punishment that Goodell metered out, he did it in spirit but not how it was agreed so ultimately he'll probably be suspended.
The NFL has to fix the situation moving forward. If it was cheating, weather conditions, bad equipment, whatever they need to fix it so it's no longer an issue.
1) The footballs for games should be considered the NFL's property and for the game they should be supplied, monitored and checked by the NFL. MLB for example doesn't let the teams play with baseballs that they bring to the game, the NFL should follow suit. No more teams bringing game balls.
2) It's questionable that the NFL needs 42 to 54 footballs per game. [mashable.com] It needs to be brought down to a reasonable number 20 or under. If that means no more "momento" footballs touchdowns etc. then too bad. After the game the officials can divvy them up between the two teams so they can distribute them how they see fit.
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Partially correct. The home team provides the balls that both teams use. There was some kind of problem in Denver with the balls provided by the Rockies. Seems the balls were too dry and so the team installed a giant humidifier to dampen the balls to be like those in other cities. IIRC, given the high elevation with less dense air and dry balls they really accelerated off the bat when hit. I don't think it was called
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It hardly matters what happened to the other 11 balls if they knew which ball was 2lbs under and kept using that ball whenever it mattered.
Thank god we have a Law (Score:2)
Fortunately we have an ideal gas Law and not just a theory or the anti-science masses would never get a believable answer on whether their circus is rigged.
A simple experiment, duplicating the prevailing (Score:2)
conditions at the time of the incident would prove or disprove it in about 5 minutes.
Dumb question from someone who knows little about football: wouldn't both teams be playing with the same balls, and thus both have equal benefit from the alleged deflation?
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If we can fix the NFL, maybe there's hope that we can get the drawing of congressional district boundaries out of the hands of politicians...
Nah...
The temperature only dropped ... (Score:2)
... on one side and stuff.
From the Duh Dept... (Score:2)
You don't need a physicist, a local tire dealer will tell you that. As air temperature drops it will cause a loss in pressure in inflated items. In an automotive tire this drop is o
This isn't rocket surgery. (Score:2)
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Thermodynamics :) (Score:2)
Wow, the first time in the history of /. (at least the decades I'm aware about it) when throwing in some well measured sentences about Thermodynamics would be adequate.
However people avoid it like the plague and instead bring up the "ideal gas law" ... pretty funny.
We are talking here about 6th grade physics, or depending on your country and education system perhaps 8th grade, and yes it is Thermodynamics, and yes it is so simple EVERYONE should grasp it.
Pretty surprising that one of the first posters expla
bullshitstorm (Score:2)
Let me climb out of my locker.... (Score:2)
Second, making jock vs geek jokes in TFA or TFS is insulting. Bullying is real and has very real consequences. I was subjected to the joked about circumstance and worse. I am no social justice warrior, but making light of a real and painful thing - one that still occurs in various forms today - only enables those that bully more easily abuse.
Oh, and of you think that it is a simple sch
The Experiment Has Been Done (Score:2)
This leaves the question of why the Colts' footballs were still fully inflated.
Waste of time (Score:2)
I don't really care about either team, but after everything I've read and seen, I think the ref checking the ball just squeezed them or checked a few and let the balls be approved. There is no list of pressures, and a former ball boy said they would not check every ball. This explains everything. If the ref did his job, checked every ball, logged it, and inflated them to specification, there would be no mystery. Either the ref is above scrutiny, or the league is just trying to cover up that their own proc
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Looks like the NFL is trying to find a way out... (Score:2)
.
Does the NFL want to find out the truth, or do they want to find ways to avoid finding out the truth?
The ideal gas law is a limiting law (Score:2)
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Of course, one can have gaseous water at temperatures below the boiling temperature of water which is responsible for relative humidity in the air in our environment. To discuss this we need to think about the tendency for liquid water to evaporate (vapor pressure) as a function of temperature and the capacity of air to hold gaseous
High School Physics/Chemistry (Score:2)
PV=nRT : A ball that is found at 10.5 psig (25.2 psia) at 35'F will be at the regulation minimum pressure 12.5 psig at 74'F. Perfectly reasonable.
The non-idealities are red-herrings: deviations for Ideal Gas Law are tiny (10ppm?) at this low a pressure and warm a temperature (relative to critical for nitrogen & oxygen). Cold leather shrinks the football pressure boundary, increasing pressure. Condensation might drop pressure 0.5 psi further if the fill-air was saturated from a steamy locker room or
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Yup.
And this is about as good as its going to get, since we don't know the exact initial conditions (temp. and relative humidity).
How does deflating even help? (Score:2)
What I really want to know about "deflate-gate" is how does it even work? What's the advantage of an under-inflated ball? It seems like it would be harder to throw an under-inflated ball accurately. It might help you grip a ball better, but how often do NFL players fumble (enough to really make a difference?)?
And how would the Patriots keep the other team from getting the same advantage? The deflated balls would end up being used by both sides right? Even if the Patriots were stealthily deflating them on th
See your doctor if ... (Score:2)
... deflation lasts more than 4 hours.
"Reached out" (Score:3)
"...has reached out to Columbia University's department of physics..."
I bet they "called" or "emailed."
"Reached out to" is a complete yambag phrase that needs to GTFO immediately.
Talk normal, people.
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... is why you keep adding "gate" to everything. That'd be a question worth the attention of our top scientists.
Indeed. I much prefer the nomenclature "ballghazi" that I've been seeing tossed around (pun intended).
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Indeed. It seems the word is subject to...
inflation.
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You could Google [wikipedia.org] it.
Re:Already debunked by one of Columbia's finest... (Score:4, Informative)
Which he had to correct [facebook.com] because he used gauge pressure in his calculation rather than absolute pressure.
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'gas physicists', Neil deGrasse Tyson. In a Jan 26th tweet he states, "For the Patriots to blame a change in temperature for 15% lower-pressures, requires balls to be inflated with 125-degree air."
Full article here: http://uproxx.com/sports/2015/... [uproxx.com]
Celsius or Fahrenheit? I presume Fahrenheit as he's an American tweeting to fellow Americans, but he's also a scientist so maybe Celsius.
125 Fahrenheit would be possible, but implausible.
125 Celsius would be absolutely ridiculous.
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A "tick" is how much exactly? Why such imprecise reporting?
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In this case, the sensational crap is making people want to know the real science. It doesn't happen often, but it does happen. Use it and get some funding for the physics lab away from the jocks for a change.
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I may have been a nerd, but I was the one stuffing kids into the lockers!
Yes, precisely! You need experimental data to find the proper stacking method for maximizing kids of varying masses within a locker superstructure.
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TFS doesn't accuse /. of initiating the study.
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No need for it to be passive. A little wireless charger would do nicely, and we already have pressure monitors in car tires.
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Yes, it's a magical totem where you never have to fill in the numbers. Just like all math.
Liquid nitrogen treatment (Score:2)