The one person who really looks bad in the whole DeflateGate scandal is Bill Nye.
No matter how you feel about Bill Belichick, Tom Brady, and the Patriots, one good thing that has come out of the DeflateGate scandal has been a national discussion of the ideal gas law, thermodynamics, and air pressure. When is the last time you heard anybody outside a high school or college science class bring up PV=nRT?
And people aren’t just discussing it, they’re passionately arguing it, doing experiments, making calculations – it’s amazing. Then along comes Bill Nye to throw some icy cold anti-intellectual water on the issue.
I never could before have imagined Bill Nye being anti-intellectual, but here’s the proof. See the portion beginning at 43 seconds in.
Nye is critiquing Belichick’s, admittedly somewhat amateurish, attempt to scientifically explain how the balls could have started at a regulation minimum 12.5 psi when checked by the officials, but later end up at lower pressures on the field.
Whether you believe Belicheck or not, one statement in the above video is patently, totally, completely, unabashedly, embarrassingly false. It’s Nye’s claim that, ” . . . to really change the pressure in the ball, you need one of these – the inflation needle.”
In one flip comment, Nye undermines the cool conversation we’ve all been having while totally discounting a whole lot of physics. The fact is you can change the relative pressure in the ball by changing the temperature of the gas inside, by changing the properties of the the material the ball is made of
(getting it wet and potentially making it more stretchy, perhaps), and
changing the pressure of the atmosphere outside the ball (can you say
“barometer,” Mr. Nye?), or by changing the shape of the ball (as might happen when 300+ pound offensive players fall on it time and time again, or after the spiking that followed a whole mess of touchdowns).
It’s possible that none of these factors explain away DeflateGate, but to unimaginatively dismiss them the way Nye did utterly undermines his cred as a science educator. Really?!?!? All it takes for him to go totally anti-science on us is to be a fan of the Seahawks?
Please, Mr. Nye, step back, think about what you did for a moment, and then try again.