“Making Sport of Physics” is the topic of a Science Gang Lecture by Dr. Eric Goff, associate professor of physics, in Hopwood Hall Auditorium at 4:30 p.m. Tuesday, October 20.
Dr. Goff will discuss research projects motivated by University of Lynchburg students, Tour de France modeling, and soccer physics.
Dr. Goff’s new book, Gold Medal Physics: The Science of Sports, is due out in late November. He 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.”
Dr. Goff finished the work on his book during the summer of 2008 and spent the past academic year at the University of Sheffield in England, where he worked with a British colleague on investigations of air forces on soccer balls.
Dr. Goff, who was originally trained as a condensed-matter theorist, initially studied what happens when high-intensity laser light hits a metal. When he came to University of Lynchburg in 2002, his research interests broadened. Motivated partly by his own curiosity and partly by his students’ interests, the physics of sports became his dominant research area.
While at LC, Dr. Goff has published seven papers in five different journals, four of them co-authored with LC students.
