PBPF did you ever hear back from that Columbia Professor?

Last I recall you had sent him the science and he was open to it.

I can't speak for @Palm Beach Pats Fan but I also sent one of the Columbia guys from the NYT article a note at one point and received a cordial response back. He commented that he wasn't happy about the quote they used for him.

But, it's worth noting that is not the guy who ultimately was selected to work on the footballs. The NYT article made clear none of the people speaking were to be involved, presumably they were all pretty high profile (the one PBPF has spoken with holds a distinguished position in the department, II Rabi professor) - they probably don't have time and gave it to a younger assistant prof or grad student. Who also won't have time, but isn't in the same position to say no.

They DAMN WELL BETTER NOT give this project to a grad student. Neither should they give it to a physics prof or student.

They should give it to an experienced (>10 year) WORKING mechanical or chemical engineer, with a lot of experience in experimental test methodology.

It's not particularly appreciated in the world, but there is NO compelling reason to get "correct answers" in academia. Nobody gets thrown out of school for getting wrong answers.

That situation is NOT the same in industry. If you give wrong answers, things break, product is recalled, people get hurt or die, and engineers get fired.

THAT's called "motivation".!

tom.kordis said:

They DAMN WELL BETTER NOT give this project to a grad student. Neither should they give it to a physics prof or student.

They should give it to an experienced (>10 year) WORKING mechanical or chemical engineer, with a lot of experience in experimental test methodology.

It's not particularly appreciated in the world, but there is NO compelling reason to get "correct answers" in academia. Nobody gets thrown out of school for getting wrong answers.

That situation is NOT the same in industry. If you give wrong answers, things break, product is recalled, people get hurt or die, and engineers get fired.

THAT's called "motivation".!

Click to expand...

What a steaming pile of anti-educational ********. Bring that crap to the victims of the BP geyser in the gulf states. They're still waiting for their money and other compensation. Do you know how many BP people lost their jobs over that one? I do...

All I know is they better give it to someone with glasses. Everyone I know with glasses is smart. Let them come at me with some report from someone with 20/20 vision. I will flip my ****.

Jackson 2 said:

What a steaming pile of anti-educational ********. Bring that crap to the victims of the BP geyser in the gulf states. They're still waiting for their money and other compensation. Do you know how many BP people lost their jobs over that one? I do...

Click to expand...

LoL.

There is NOTHING - not ONE WORD - in that entire post that is "anti-educational". Neither is there anything in that post that is incorrect, when painting in broad stokes.

If you had ANYTHING of substance to offer, perhaps you'd care to point out SOMETHING THAT I SAID, give your assertions as to how it's wrong, and maybe we'd discuss it. Instead of invoking nebulous, irrelevant Red Herrings.

So, how long have you been out of school?
What profession?

Bobsyouruncle said:

All I know is they better give it to someone with glasses. Everyone I know with glasses is smart. Let them come at me with some report from someone with 20/20 vision. I will flip my ****.

Click to expand...

tom.kordis said:

LoL.

There is NOTHING - not ONE WORD - in that entire post that is "anti-educational". Neither is there anything in that post that is incorrect, when painting in broad stokes.

If you had ANYTHING of substance to offer, perhaps you'd care to point out SOMETHING THAT I SAID, give your assertions as to how it's wrong, and maybe we'd discuss it. Instead of invoking nebulous, irrelevant Red Herrings.

So, how long have you been out of school?
What profession?

Click to expand...

Kiss off. I don't owe you anything. You have no sense of the proper use of upper case letters and punctuation marks. In addition, you still haven't answered my question.

tom.kordis said:

They DAMN WELL BETTER NOT give this project to a grad student. Neither should they give it to a physics prof or student.

They should give it to an experienced (>10 year) WORKING mechanical or chemical engineer, with a lot of experience in experimental test methodology.

It's not particularly appreciated in the world, but there is NO compelling reason to get "correct answers" in academia. Nobody gets thrown out of school for getting wrong answers.

That situation is NOT the same in industry. If you give wrong answers, things break, product is recalled, people get hurt or die, and engineers get fired.

THAT's called "motivation".!

Click to expand...

Snob. (Reverse snob, actually.)

Experimental physicists know how to measure things. In fact, a large fraction of what they do -- and this goes back at least to Galileo -- is invent data collection and measurement technology and techniques.

And since you're asking for credentials -- I was a physics major most of the way through college, and I have a somewhat above-average knowledge of history of science.

tom.kordis said:

LoL.

There is NOTHING - not ONE WORD - in that entire post that is "anti-educational". Neither is there anything in that post that is incorrect, when painting in broad stokes.

If you had ANYTHING of substance to offer, perhaps you'd care to point out SOMETHING THAT I SAID, give your assertions as to how it's wrong, and maybe we'd discuss it. Instead of invoking nebulous, irrelevant Red Herrings.

So, how long have you been out of school?
What profession?

Click to expand...

Sorry dude, you are dead wrong. I was a "physicist" through grad school and currently am an "engineer" in industry. I use quotation marks because I have been doing similar stuff throughout so don't know what the arbitrary distinction means. I can tell you that my experiments as a physicist were far more exacting and precise compared to my tests as an engineer. This is because physics is concerned with MEASUREMENT whereas engineering is mainly concerned with MARGIN. In engineering you don't need to know exact values as long as your machine works and you have a healthy tolerance.

tom.kordis said:

They DAMN WELL BETTER NOT give this project to a grad student. Neither should they give it to a physics prof or student.

They should give it to an experienced (>10 year) WORKING mechanical or chemical engineer, with a lot of experience in experimental test methodology.

It's not particularly appreciated in the world, but there is NO compelling reason to get "correct answers" in academia. Nobody gets thrown out of school for getting wrong answers.

That situation is NOT the same in industry. If you give wrong answers, things break, product is recalled, people get hurt or die, and engineers get fired.

THAT's called "motivation".!

Click to expand...

I'm sorry - I have to call ******** on this one. I appreciate all you have contributed to this forum with your knowledge, and have a lot of respect for your opinions, but this is a very narrow view. As someone who has as a third party interacted with both sides of the equation here, but is part of neither group, I feel like I have to share my point of view.

I have a ton of respect for engineers. I'd wager they are often the smartest & most reliable people at their companies.

And yes, there are a surprising amount of Phd students who coast by, and PIs who let unqualified students through quals because they've invested two years in them. A few years later they come out a doctorate. However, this is the minority, and these students might have a Phd in science, but they will not truly have become a scientist - and at a much more efficient rate than any other discipline, whether they pursue academia or industry, they will soon be weeded out.

Likewise, I've known several engineers who smoke/drank their way through college, eventually acquired 6 figure jobs, got promotions, and so forth. Because guess what - no matter the field, having people who find success they don't deserve is ubiquitous. If you think it is something that happens at a higher rate in academia, then you must have had some very different experiences in the world than I have.

Aforementioned exceptions excluded, there may be no degree harder to obtain than a Phd in science. When they are finished, they will have spent five or six years re-wiring their brain to have become a person who thinks critically every moment of the day, and can take a small amount of information and turn it into a large amount of understanding.

Sure, academia (and even more specifically physics academia) has its fair share of problems at the moment, like any field/industry. But I will say academic physics might be one of the single most competitive fields in the world. And for that reason, I cannot take your "there is no compelling reason to avoid wrong answers" seriously. But, there's an even more compelling reason why most scientists want to get the right answer and that's simply because at a disproportionate rate, they are fundamentally curious people. Acquiring knowledge for the sake of knowledge is an excellent (and fair) motivator.

To just wrap up this unfortunately overly long post - I'll just say again, as a third party, I have a tremendous amount of respect for both fields you are talking about, and I find it unfortunate that you lack this mutual respect.

tom.kordis said:

They DAMN WELL BETTER NOT give this project to a grad student. Neither should they give it to a physics prof or student.

They should give it to an experienced (>10 year) WORKING mechanical or chemical engineer, with a lot of experience in experimental test methodology.

It's not particularly appreciated in the world, but there is NO compelling reason to get "correct answers" in academia. Nobody gets thrown out of school for getting wrong answers.

That situation is NOT the same in industry. If you give wrong answers, things break, product is recalled, people get hurt or die, and engineers get fired.

THAT's called "motivation".!

Click to expand...

Tom, I respect your postings here the past 3 weeks and have learned much from it.

I would say that common sense would dictate that BOTH sides of the divide should be consulted - - working engineers AND academics. I, too, would look askance at this if all the investigation leaned on was the Columbia University Physics Dept. There should be input from at least an engineering firm also.

Jackson 2 said:

What a steaming pile of anti-educational ********.

Click to expand...

Jackson, I am not in the slightest "anti-education". I have spent over 30 years encouraging high school students to get as much & the best education possible.

The main thing that engineering students know how to do is "pass tests", because "passing tests" IS their job.
That AIN'T engineering.

Let's see your intellectual chops.
Please explain to me how the fact that a bunch of roughnecks, inspectors & accountants screwed the pooch on an oil platform proves that a bunch of wet-behind-the-ears engineering students are competent at running engineering tests.

If you are able to interpret what I wrote, you'll see that it says, in essence, that I want people who are well experienced in running tests involving the measurements of pressure & temperature ... to run some tests involving the measurements of pressure & temperature.

So, i'm not the slightest bit "anti-education".
I am very, very strongly "pro-experience".

I see that I've stuck a stick in a hornet's nest.
Let me try to explain my perspective.

Wells & the NFL are acting as "project managers". They have no technical knowledge of temperature, pressures or test protocols. They must leverage the expertise of others.

The job required here is "designing, running & interpreting an experimental test protocol involving the measurement of temperatures & pressures".

[ETA: And a KEY part of the job is to produce a report in which the lay public, with little technical expertise of their own, can have confidence in the conclusions, without having to interpret the data themselves.]

The job of undergrad & grad engineering students is to graduate with some degree.
(BTW, "student" = "inexperienced". Painting with broad strokes, of course.)

The job of engineering professors is to teach engineering students.

A relatively small portion of each occupations' job is "designing, running & interpreting experimental test protocols ...".

There are literally millions of technically competent people (students, teachers, clever poets, etc.) who COULD do this job properly & conclusively. There is nothing that I've said that suggests that engineering students or professors could not do so.

I am not the slightest bit interested in the long, long list of people who COULD do the job competently.

I am very interested in the very short list of people in whom I will have a high confidence WILL do the job competently.

The ONLY people that I am going to turn to are experts who have a demonstrated track record of success (aka, "experience") in the SPECIFIC JOB of "designing, running & interpreting experimental test protocols involving the measurements of temperature & pressure".

[ETA: And can produce a report that the unbiased subset of the general population is likely to accept.]

Sorry if I got anybody's knickers in a bunch...

Fencer said:

Snob. (Reverse snob, actually.)

Experimental physicists know how to measure things. In fact, a large fraction of what they do -- and this goes back at least to Galileo -- is invent data collection and measurement technology and techniques.

And since you're asking for credentials -- I was a physics major most of the way through college, and I have a somewhat above-average knowledge of history of science.

Click to expand...

Fencer, "experimental physicist, WITH experience" is absolutely qualified, as would be any "experimental technical field, WITH experience".

"Getting a degree in something" is VASTLY different than "having extensive experience in that field".

You ARE what you DO.

Neil deGrasse Tyson: "... completed a bachelor's degree in physics at Harvard University in 1980. After receiving a master's degree in astronomy at the University of Texas at Austin in 1983, he earned his master's (1989) and doctorate (1991) in astrophysics from Columbia University. For the next three years, he was a postdoctoral research associate at Princeton University," (wikipedia)

One might think that, with all this training in physics, with the core importance of temperature & pressure to cosmology, that Dr. Tyson would be a valid "expert" on this question.

One would be gravely mistaken.

As proven by the fact that Tyson screwed the pooch on the theoretical calculation, and then screwed the pooch again when he tried to fix his first screw-up.

REAL experts don't screw up simple calculations.

Bill Nye got his mechanical engineering degree from the same institute that I did (Cornell U, mechanical). You might think that he is a mechanical engineer.

He is not. He is an "educator, an advocate for & a popularizer of science".

If he were really a mechanical engineer, he would have put pen to paper & done a couple of simple calculations, and done them competently, before blowing off his mouth with unmitigated crap.

You ARE what you DO.

Both experimental physicists and lab hands on engineers should be easily able to set up controlled experiments illustrating the effect of temperature and yes moisture (possible quicker thermal equilibrium) on scuffed "used" NFL footballs. Heck, even when I was in management VP of engineering (internet systems) at my startup I did the lab work running lots of the voltage, temperature chamber, whatever NEBS qualification tests for the stuff we designed so that the real working engineers could keep doing their new detailed designs for better stuff.

Anyone regardless of specific physics or hardware engineering degree who is trained in engineering/experimental methodology, understands the basic physics and how to set up and run valid controlled experiments should be able to do this, even if they're at a New York institution of learning.

tom.kordis said:

Fencer, "experimental physicist, WITH experience" is absolutely qualified, as would be any "experimental technical field, WITH experience".

"Getting a degree in something" is VASTLY different than "having extensive experience in that field".

You ARE what you DO.

Neil deGrasse Tyson: "... completed a bachelor's degree in physics at Harvard University in 1980. After receiving a master's degree in astronomy at the University of Texas at Austin in 1983, he earned his master's (1989) and doctorate (1991) in astrophysics from Columbia University. For the next three years, he was a postdoctoral research associate at Princeton University," (wikipedia)

One might think that, with all this training in physics, with the core importance of temperature & pressure to cosmology, that Dr. Tyson would be a valid "expert" on this question.

One would be gravely mistaken.

As proven by the fact that Tyson screwed the pooch on the theoretical calculation, and then screwed the pooch again when he tried to fix his first screw-up.

REAL experts don't screw up simple calculations.

Bill Nye got his mechanical engineering degree from the same institute that I did (Cornell U, mechanical). You might think that he is a mechanical engineer.

He is not. He is an "educator, an advocate for & a popularizer of science".

If he were really a mechanical engineer, he would have put pen to paper & done a couple of simple calculations, and done them competently, before blowing off his mouth with unmitigated crap.

You ARE what you DO.

Click to expand...

And I make doozies of mistakes myself from time to time, including in my area of work. I was on the phone with my client, the CEO of Databricks last night, talking about Amazon Redshift. I called it Red Brick, which embarrassingly is somewhat of a competing product. Confusion ensued.

But the equilibrium calculations aren't what matter anyway. More relevant is the speed at which equilibrium is reached, and that can only be assessed by experimentation rather than theory.

PatsWickedPissah said:

Both experimental physicists and lab hands on engineers should be easily able to set up controlled experiments illustrating the effect of temperature and yes moisture (possible quicker thermal equilibrium) on scuffed "used" NFL footballs. Heck, even when I was in management VP of engineering (internet systems) at my startup I did the lab work running lots of the voltage, temperature chamber, whatever NEBS qualification tests for the stuff we designed so that the real working engineers could keep doing their new detailed designs for better stuff.

Anyone regardless of specific physics or hardware engineering degree who is trained in engineering/experimental methodology, understands the basic physics and how to set up and run valid controlled experiments should be able to do this, even if they're at a New York institution of learning.

Click to expand...

My main college girlfriend was a biochemistry undergraduate. Her adviser was Nobel Laureate Konrad Bloch. He wandered into her lab once asking what he could do to help; she said she could use some test tubes washed. So he did. And then she acknowledged him in her thesis for "technical assistance". He loved it.

But he was a great guy anyway. We went to a party at his house and he played a Tom Lehrer record. He was shocked that she and I could sing along to most of the songs, and didn't know there were two others. I promptly got him one as a gift, and got a nice thank you note in return.

Fencer said:

And I make doozies of mistakes myself from time to time, including in my area of work. I was on the phone with my client, the CEO of Databricks last night, talking about Amazon Redshift. I called it Red Brick, which embarrassingly is somewhat of a competing product. Confusion ensued.

Click to expand...

This mistake is a failure of memory. We all make mistakes like this. These mistakes are irrelevant in the discussion of who is, & isn't, a real expert about some particular subject.

The reason that I love science is that you have to remember almost nothing. Understanding replaces memorization.

Tyson and all the bozos who blew the calculation didn't have to remember to use absolute pressure. If he were really an expert in this specific field, he would have figured it out correctly, by thinking about for a couple of seconds. The units drop right out of the defining equation (PV = nRT).

Fencer said:

But the equilibrium calculations aren't what matter anyway. More relevant is the speed at which equilibrium is reached, and that can only be assessed by experimentation rather than theory.

Click to expand...

Surprisingly, the two time constants (warm to cold vs. cold to warm) are EXTREMELY different.

My tests were specifically designed to look at steady state pressure & temp, and to check to see that I'd reached that state. In order to do this, I used 3 different "soak cycles":

1. One minute in 48°F water, blot dry with a towel, 9 minutes in a 50°F refrigerator, repeated for 70 minutes. (This was my "mimic ball usage" condition.)

2. One minute in 48°F water, blot dry with a towel, 4 minutes in a 50°F refrigerator. (This was an intermediate state between 1 & 3, to see if there was a monotonic trend.)

3. Seven minutes in 48°F water, 3 minutes at room temp (71°F). (This was my "steady state" condition.)

There was no difference in the results for the 3 balls. My conclusion was that, even the 1 minute / 10 minute exposure to water was sufficient to bring the temp to the steady state temp in 70 minutes, by virtue of its comparison to the 7 minutes / 10 minute condition.

The lesson is that the drenching water constitutes a powerful heat sink.

But, in the opposite direction (cold to warm), the heat transfer is extremely slow. Even after drying the balls off & 3 hours of sitting at room temperature (71°F), the pressure in the balls was still around 11.3 psi (compared to 11.0 psig steady state), indicating a still low temperature for the air inside the ball. Exposure of the soaked ball to room temp air did NOT bring it quickly back up to temp.

I didn't expect this result, but as soon as I saw it, the cause is obvious: the ball acts as an unopened thermos (no air convection) wrapped in a cold, wet blanket (the soaked leather).

@tom.kordis Why would a water bath be a good model for rain-filled air? I imagine the thermal conductivity of the two is very different.