Gold Medal Physics
"Mathematically minded readers who've always wondered how great athletes do what they do will learn from Goff how to view the world of sports through the lens of physics."
That's how Publishers Weekly describes Gold Medal Physics: The Science of Sports, a news book out by Dr. Eric Goff, associate professor of physics and chair of the physics department at Lynchburg College. The book is available in hardback and paperback.
Dr. Goff's publisher, The Johns Hopkins University Press, says: "Nothing is quite as thrilling as watching superior athletes do the seemingly impossible. From Doug Flutie's Hail Mary pass to Lance Armstrong's record-breaking climb of Alp d'Huez to David Beckham's astounding ability to bend a soccer kick, we marvel and wonder, 'How did they do that?' Well, physics professor John Eric Goff has the answers."
Dr. Goff says his book "is pitched at a general audience. Anybody who has a passion for sports and at least a cursory interest in science will like it. I tackled several sports in the book: football, cycling, long jump, skating, diving, soccer, discus, and sumo."
His publisher is even more enthusiastic, saying: "Fun, witty, and imbued throughout with admiration for the simple beauty of physics, Gold Medal Physics is sure to inspire readers to think differently about the next sporting event they watch."
Dr. Goff finished the work on his book during the summer of 2008, and has spent the past academic year at the University of Sheffield in England, where he has been working with a British colleague on investigations of air forces on soccer balls.
"We've determined coefficients associated with lift and drag on the ball for launch conditions not yet attainable in today's wind tunnels," Dr. Goff said. "Beyond sports physics, my work contributes to an understanding of fluid flow around spherical objects."
After he came to Lynchburg College in 2002, motivated partly by his own curiosity and partly by his students' interests, Dr. Goff switched his research to the physics of sports. While at LC, Dr. Goff has published eight papers in five different journals, four of them coauthored with LC students.
"Involving students in research is of paramount importance to me," Dr. Goff said. "I have led students through projects on such diverse topics as Tour de France modeling, semiconductors and solar cells, computational fluid mechanics, soccer modeling, and oscillator systems in classical mechanics."
Dr. Goff's 2006 paper on soccer caught the eye of a sports engineering researcher at the University of Sheffield who invited Dr. Goff to spend the 2008-09 academic year working with him in Sheffield. To help fund his sabbatical, Dr. Goff won the 2008 Mednick Award, and a Bridging the Gaps fellowship from the University of Sheffield that paid for travel expenses and all living expenses for his first three months in Sheffield.
The Johns Hopkins University Press has offered Goff a second book deal, this time focusing on extreme sports.
