DID Isaac Newton play tennis? He certainly liked to watch it, for as he first observed light rays bending in and out of his prism, in 1666, “I remembered that I had often seen a Tennis ball, struck with an oblique Racket, describe such a curve line.” His three laws of motion, too, as Howard Brody liked to point out, make a pretty good synopsis of a game of tennis: 1, An object in a state of uniform motion will remain in that motion unless it encounters an external force; 2, force equals mass times acceleration; and 3, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction (unless the ball goes out).
Professor Brody’s love of tennis, perhaps like Newton’s, was never quite matched by his skill. From fumbling tournaments in high school (“The coach gave up”), he progressed to four years of varsity play at MIT, and for one heady month coached the men’s team at the University of Pennsylvania where, for almost all his career, he was a physics professor. His original field, though, was particle and nuclear physics, the result of a boyhood fascination with a little book called “Atoms in Action”; and it was only by a fortuitous piece...
from The Economist: Obituary http://ift.tt/1NWJF6I
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