Baltimore running back Willis McGahee was seriously injured after a collision with the Steelers' Ryan Clark in the A.F.C. championship game. Julie Jacobson/Associated PressFrom The New York Times:
TAMPA, Fla. — Isaac Newton’s apple hurt considerably less than Ryan Clark’s coconut. But they did have a few things in common.
Clark’s shockingly violent hit on the Baltimore Ravens’ Willis McGahee two Sundays ago — a full-speed, helmet-to-helmet crash that left McGahee unconscious and Clark all but — didn’t just follow the N.F.L.’s rules, but Newton’s as well. Force equaled mass times acceleration. Momentum was conserved. And the bodies finally came to rest, McGahee’s on a stretcher.
“How I look at it, you can be the hammer or the nail,” the inner scientist in Clark explained this week. “I try to be the hammer.”
The tackle, the art of making the ball carrier not stay in motion, is football’s most primeval action. Amusing physicists the way batting averages do actuaries, collisions lead the highlight reels, impart the force of a deadly car crash, and rely upon kinematics that date to a considerably different big bang.
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