The science of the sport emerges in riveting detail in Newton’s Football’
elf-described science evangelist, Ainissa Ramirez is on a mission to make science ess intimidating and more accessible by revealing how ingrained it is in our everyay lives, whether you’re a math lover or a football fan.
The New York-based scientist and Stanford alum — Ramirez earned both her nd Ph.D in materials science and engineering there — worked for Bell Laboratopent a decade on the Yale University faculty. Today, she’s an award-winning writer, and keynote speaker, whose TED talk on science education inspired her first book, Science.”
he gridiron that er second, “Newton’s The book, co-authored nalist Allen St. John, ders a different pern a timeless American explaining everything complexities of chaos the physical evolution of
than bogging readers h physics-heavy materez brings the book to ascinating anecdotes — ce Lombardi and Isaac eddy Roosevelt, “Shrek” a coach’s reluctance to go ourth-down is essentially monkey-brain.
Q
In “Newton’s Football,” you talk a lot about chaos theory and the role it plays in the game. Can you boil that down for us?
A
Chaos theory is really about how if you change how something starts, even with just a small modification, you can drastically change the outcome. When I was writing “Newton’s Football,” I met a coach who figured out that if he trained his players so they didn’t need to rest between plays, they could start the next play right away, while the other team is still trying to catch their breath. That birthed the no-huddle offense. By changing those initial conditions, he’s giving himself an advantage, which is essentially chaos theory in a nutshell.
Q
You’ve said that Vince Lombardi and his background in physics and probability defined his coaching style. Are there other coaches out there right now following
that legacy?
AI don’t know how m them have the same ground, but I think a lot that STEM mindset. Foot all about gaining the adv which may be through a of the rules or by just usi
r, which often involves mathematicians and That’s actually how the st offense came about. ght, OK, how do I get g down the field? Use gorean theorem! They have been scientists s, but they knew to ask questions, and that’s a very common practice in pretty much every discipline. It happens in science, and it happens on the football field.
Q
If you were a football coach, what’s the first thing you would teach your players? Spend less time on the field and more in the classroom?
AWell, what did Vince Lombardi do? Study the game and learn about physics. Learn about the body, so you can apply those lessons to your own body and improve your conditioning. It’s not just about the classroom, though. A lot of people don’t think that football players have good brains, but they do. They’re smart like everyone else, and they are also smart in ways that most people are not. When I spoke to Jerry Rice and Bob Shuler, those were heavy conversations where I could not keep up; they were such experts in their field, and they really understood the strategy involved. Whether it’s something that’s innate or something that’s trained, I don’t know, but there’s definitely an athletic intelligence component to it.
QOne of your chapters, which delves into the distinctive shape of the football, is titled “The Divinely Random Bounce of the Prolate Spheroid” ...
AThe original football actually started off a bit flatter and more roundish than the football we have today, but as football evolved towards more of a throwing game, the pigskin developed a kind of nozzle at the end, so it could cut through the air more easily. However, this means it doesn’t typically behave well when it bounces on the ground. When that happens, you see these confident athletes suddenly look like silly kindergartners, jumping on the ball to try and stop it, because there really is no way to determine where that ball is going to bounce. If you took a football, dipped it in paint and bounced it 100 times the same way, by the end, the field would look like an abstract painting, because it’s just so chaotic and completely random.
Q
Were you surprised anything during you research for “Newton’s F
A
I learned a ton! I’m a I did not start off wri book as a football fan, bu with my brother, who is, say things like “Hey, I tal this guy Jerry Rice today, big deal?” I knew who Je was — I was just messing him — but there’s a lot I know about the sport goi this. Writing “Newton’s F was just as much part of education as it was my w
Q
What’s a science eva
A
I feel like a lot of peo get turned off by scie and so I’m trying to re-en them. That’s the reason I “Newton’s Football.” I wa show people who didn’t t science was for them ho actually use science ever That’s my schtick. I like t people the science they a employ, so it doesn’t see foreign to them.