A former S&T physics professor will return to Rolla to discuss the physics of football next week. Dr. Tim Gay, now a professor at the University of Nebraska, will discuss a series of one-minute physics lectures he gave to Nebraska fans during home football games from 1999 to 2004. The lecture will be held from 4-5 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 22, in Room 104 of the Physics Building.

Gay’s football lectures covered such topics as Newton’s Laws of Motion (blocking and tackling), projectile motion (kicking and punting) and kinematics (open-field running). His work has been featured in a variety of venues, including ABC World News Tonight with Peter Jennings, ESPN’s Cold Pizza and the Wall Street Journal. He wrote and appeared in television segments for NFL Blast!, and wrote the book “Football Physics,” which was renamed “The Physics of Football” in its second edition.
Gay taught at Missouri S&T from 1983 until 1993, when he joined the faculty at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His research interests center on the scattering of electrons by atomic and molecular targets and elementary particle physics. For more information about the lecture, visit web.mst.edu/~hale/gay.pdf.