How does a spiraling football affect the distance ?

dsjosephs · Post by **dsjosephs** » Wed Oct 17, 2007 8:08 am

I chose the topic from this website, and my mom bought the book Football Physics by Timothy Gay, but the book is too hard and I don't know how to start the project. Please help or I need to tell my teacher to change my topic!!

Craig_Bridge · Post by **Craig_Bridge** » Wed Oct 17, 2007 8:44 am

What grade are you in?

Are you refering to the Additional Project Ideas

Aerodynamics of a Football
How much difference does the spiraling motion of a well-thrown football make on the distance of the throw (compared to wobbling, or end-over-end motion of the ball)? Think of a way to reproducibly produce the desired ball motion and launch it with a constant force to find out. (For more information on the physics, see Gay, 2004.)
Gay, T., Ph.D., 2005. The Physics of Football. New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers.

These additional project ideas have an open ended upper level of difficulty. You can make them as difficult as you care to and they don't come with any examples of simpler things and level of difficulty.

All science investigations start with a hypthesis. What is yours? If you don't understand what I'm talking about, then try reading https://www.sciencebuddies.org/mentorin ... thod.shtml

dsjosephs · Post by **dsjosephs** » Wed Oct 17, 2007 9:55 am

I am in the third grade.
How can I use the book, Football Physics' to explain the difference bet. a regular thrown football and a spiral?

dsjosephs · Post by **dsjosephs** » Wed Oct 17, 2007 9:57 am

Why does a spiraling football have a different distance than a regular thrown football? Where can I find this information????

Craig_Bridge · Post by **Craig_Bridge** » Wed Oct 17, 2007 3:23 pm

Now that we know we need to bring it down to the third grade level, have you tried putting "Physics of throwing a football" into http://www.ask.com?

If you haven't try it, please try it! I did. Besides finding multiple articles to read, there are some hints Under the "Narrow Your Search" where
"Properly Throwing a Football", "Mechanics of Throwing a Football", "Throw Spiral Football", "Aerodymanics Football", "Throwing Footballs for Distance", and a whole lot more. I'm sure there are several articles somewhere in this that you can read and understand easier than the more advanced book that will help to answer your question.

Once you have done some reading, see if you can propose a reason for your question:

Why does a spiraling football have a different distance than a regular thrown football?

and post it back for some help in coming up with an experiment to attempt to prove it.

Hint: If you look at the football from different angles you see a different shape. This shape difference can affect aerodynamics.

dsjosephs · Post by **dsjosephs** » Thu Oct 18, 2007 5:17 am

My mom says thank you. you were lots of help

dsjosephs · Post by **dsjosephs** » Thu Oct 18, 2007 5:17 am

dsjosephs wrote: My mom says thank you. you were lots of help

davidkallman · Post by **davidkallman** » Thu Oct 18, 2007 9:01 am

Hi dsjosephs,

As an experiment, I submitted " to answers.com (another web search tool). The second hit is:

http://en.allexperts.com/q/Popular-Scie ... otball.htm
which directly answers your question.

Notes:

1. The top hit is: https://www.sciencebuddies.org/mentorin ... orts.shtml which is the sciencebuddies page containing the project description!

2. There are quite a few "sponsored links" to avoid.

dsjosephs · Post by **dsjosephs** » Thu Oct 18, 2007 10:37 am

this website has been great thanks so much..from dsjosephs mom

Craig_Bridge · Post by **Craig_Bridge** » Thu Oct 18, 2007 2:03 pm

Beware the following comment is a bit beyond the thrid grade level: http://en.allexperts.com/q/Popular-Scie ... otball.htm talks about Bernouli principle providing lift in very unscientific mystical and magical ways that defy symmetry. It reminds me of a "Myth-Buster's" segment on over hand thrown "rising" fast balls in baseball which was busted (do not exist). Note: the baseball "sinker" and "curve" are possible as they do not defy gravity.

Back to third grade level: The best short answer I found was on the "Newton" site http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/p ... y99477.htm

I didn't post it originally because even a third grader needs to do some research on their own.

davidkallman · Post by **davidkallman** » Thu Oct 18, 2007 6:51 pm

Oops! In my prior post, I must have deleted the input to answers.com It is:

"How does a spiraling football affect the distance?"

bradleyshanrock-solberg · Fri Oct 19, 2007 10:44 am

Both footballs and baseballs have some weird aerodynamics that only work in atmosphere like Earth's.

If you are interested in this topic you may also want to try the same reasearch techniques with baseballs.

The reason softball pitching is totally different from baseball pitching is that the baseball (including its stitching) behaves very differently when it spins vs when it does not spin, both in speed and how it "moves around" between when the pitcher releases it and it goes over the plate.

Make the atmostphere thinner or thicker and you need a different shape or design of ball to have the same kind of game. The math to describe why this happens is pretty arcane (it involves air turbulence, which is usually a college aerodynamics engineering course). It might be interesting to see if there are good layman explanations out there and then keep it in mind next time you watch a baseball game.

I certainly appreciated what those major league pitchers do much more after learning more about how baseballs behave.

How does a spiraling football affect the distance ?

How does a spiraling football affect the distance ?

Re: How does a spiraling football affect the distance?

Re: How does a spiraling football affect the distance?