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NFL Asks Columbia University For Help With Deflate-Gate
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."
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).
Which he had to correct because he used gauge pressure in his calculation rather than absolute pressure.
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.
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!