Wooster Students Win National Award in Nanobowl Video Contest

Physics majors capture People's Choice Award

Wooster physics majors (from left) John Gamble, Heather Moore, and Alison Huff celebrate their victory in the award-winning Nanobowl video "Theoretical Football."

WOOSTER, Ohio - The College of Wooster's Physics Club has won the People's Choice Award in the national Nanobowl Video Contest, sponsored by the American Physical Society to coincide with Super Bowl XLII. Unfortunately, they don't have much to show for their efforts.

The award, you see (well, actually, you can't), is a nanoscale trophy created in silicon and metal, which is visible only under super high-magnification scanning probe microscopes. The width of the award is about 1,000 times thinner than a strand of human hair.

Get the picture? Well, maybe not.

But that's okay, the students who produced and participated in the award-winning video would be happy to show you what it looks like when magnified 100,000 times in the lab. Not only that, but they would also be interested in illustrating what the game of football looks like from the vantage point of physicists. In fact, that's exactly what they did in their award-winning video.

"Theoretical Football" is a fast-paced three-minute video that illustrates the science behind the game with a heart-pounding, yet humorous, competition between two teams, each consisting of three physics majors. Instead of tackles and touchdowns, however, these students use mathematics and Newton's laws to develop equations that describe what happens when, for example, two players collide at high speed on the field. They also construct the parabolic trajectory of the football as it glides through the air, calculate its range, and derive the formula for a football that is spinning briskly on its axis.

The idea for the video came from John Lindner, professor of physics and advisor to the Physics Club, who thought it would be fun to show what would happen if physicists took up football. "Wooster physics majors are multidimensional," says Lindner."They have the technical expertise and the creative talent to make a video that is both very clever and very cinematic."

In the video, the team of John Gamble, Heather Moore, and Alison Huff, dressed in black College of Wooster football jerseys, squares off against Henry Timmers, Mark Wellons, and Mark Zimmerman, each wearing a white Wooster jersey. The black team is coached by Lindner, while the white team is led by Todd McAlpine, assistant professor of physics at Wooster. The referee is another physics major, Frank King.

The fans go crazy as their heroes enter the arena, but instead of a gridiron, this battle takes place inside a lecture hall. The tension mounts as the two teams work feverishly in applying the laws of motion to derive the correct formulas describing the game. Even the coaches get caught up in the excitement, as McAlpine chews out one of his players for making a mistake in one of his computations. Lindner, meanwhile, is calmer as he paces the sidelines wearing a hat reminiscent of the one worn by former Ohio State head coach Earle Bruce. In the end, Lindner's team prevails and celebrates by gathering around a giant slide rule.

The video, which was directed and edited by Gamble, was posted on YouTube, where visitors could vote for their favorite entry. Wooster received the most votes in the People's Choice category, and took home the trophy, which will have to be enlarged about 100,000 times before it can be displayed.