How many US college football players major in physics?
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.010025
As you might expect, the Wall Street Journal has a small sports department. But despite its modest size, the department is often more interesting than those of the other newspapers I subscribe to, the Redskins-obsessed Washington Post and the Yankees-obsessed New York Times.
For example, in today’s WSJ, David Biderman reasoned that
because college athletes occasionally do things other than play football, practice football, watch football and play football video games, we decided to go through the media guides of every major-college football team to see what these guys study.
Biderman and his team found 1104 student footballers whose majors were disclosed. The four most popular majors were business (155 students), sociology (134), communications (108), and liberal arts (103). The least popular, with one student apiece, were Spanish and philosophy. Physics scored zero.
Having seen thousands of physicists thronging at meetings of the American Physical Society, I can confidently generalize that most of us don’t look like football players. Still, achievement in athletics and physics are not mutually exclusive.
When he was an undergraduate at Peterhouse , the oldest and smallest of Cambridge University’s constituent colleges, William Thomson won the university’s single sculling championship.
Thomson became a great physicist. He is better known as Lord Kelvin, the title bestowed on him by Queen Victoria. I couldn’t find a picture of Thomson in a single scull. But to give you an idea of what he might have looked like in his rowing prime, here’s the reigning Olympic single sculls champion, Olaf Tufte of Norway.
