Always on the ball, Chang Kee Jung teaches physics with sports

A  visit to Dr. Chang Kee Jung's "The Physics of Sports" class is a unique experience — like watching the Learning Channel and ESPN on the same TV at the same time. The ponytailed professor walks around his classroom with a Power Point remote in one hand and a baseball in the other, lecturing on the laws of physics as applied to sports.

Dr. Jung, of Stony Brook's Department of Physics and Astronomy, is an astro-particle physicist who is heading three major scientific research enterprises. This sky-diving, bungee-jumping father of three is as passionate about teaching as he is about science and sports.

Portal Into the World of Science
Sports has always been a big part of college life, even as part of the curriculum. Universities have courses on sports marketing, sports training, sports law, sports psychology, and sports nutrition, among others. That's why when Dr. Jung, a self-confessed "sports junkie," wanted to teach an introductory-level class about the physics of sports, he was surprised to find a dearth of courses about the subject anywhere in the country.

After extensive research he found one course on the physics of baseball, taught by a colleague at Yale but no longer offered. However, that course was based on complex theorems and equations that made it virtually incomprehensible to anyone but advanced physics and math students. This wasn't the kind of course Dr. Jung had in mind. He wanted to use students' interest in sports as a portal into the world of science-to open young minds to the possibility that they might find physics or math interesting but were just too afraid or intimidated to find out.

Play-by-Play Teaching
Dr. Jung explains to his class that when Mariano Rivera throws his cut fastball he is relying on Magnus force applied to a spinning object to make it sink. Peyton Manning is able to complete all those football passes because angular momentum keeps the ball he throws on its trajectory. And Michael Jordan's incredible hangtime-it all boils down to gravity.

When Dr. Jung asks his class how long they think Jordan stays airborne, answers range from three to ten seconds. In fact, Jordan's hangtime is less than a second. The reason most people think it's so much longer isn't because of physics as much as psychology. We've all seen so many slow-motion replays of his incredible dunks that the time-lapse version of his aerial ballet is imprinted on our memory.

It's not just the mechanics of a sport that intrigues Dr. Jung. A die-hard New York Knicks fan and season-ticket holder, Dr. Jung is especially impressed with their new coach, the peripatetic Larry Brown. "He is able to win without having the most talented team [because] he doesn't just draw up plays on a blackboard, he educates his players about the right way to play basketball…he teaches the fundamentals."

That's the way Dr. Jung teaches physics.

Changing View of the Universe
Dr. Jung is one of the world's leading experts on neutrinos, subatomic particles that are so small, so ubiquitous, and so mysterious that uncovering their secrets may well provide answers to questions about the universe and its origins that have been vexing scientists since the discovery of the Big Bang.

In 1998 he participated in an extraordinarily sensitive experiment to measure and record the properties of neutrinos. The discovery that neutrinos have mass and oscillate, change properties from one kind to another and back again, altering the way scientists approach particle physics and even the way they look at the universe.

Dr. Jung is playing a leadership role in the U.S. effort in three major multimillion-dollar research projects in facilities thousands of miles from Stony Brook. The Super-Kamiokande/K2K experiment uses detectors on the east and west coasts of Japan to detect and analyze neutrinos.

The published data generated from this  project have garnered more citations than any other paper in the history of experimental particle physics. The T2K project, also based in Japan, continues the work of K2K but is more precise and detailed.

Journey to the Center of the Earth
His latest effort, which is awaiting approval from the National Science Foundation, is the Henderson Underground Science and Engineering Project (HUSEP). This facility is built in an active mine in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado, dug more than a mile deep into the earth's core. Because neutrinos can pass unobstructed through matter, HUSEP will enable Dr. Jung and his colleagues to utilize their ultra-sensitive instruments to conduct a highly detailed analysis of neutrino oscillations without interference from any other cosmic rays that can't penetrate the dense rock.

The data they collect and analyze from their research projects will be an important step in helping science to ultimately realize Einstein's dream of a unified theory that defines everything in the universe from the smallest subatomic particle to the largest supernova.

Though his research commitments take him to Japan, Colorado, and other distant locations, Dr. Jung rarely misses a class. His unbridled energy, boundless curiosity, and passion for knowledge drive him to solve the mysteries of science and sports, whether it's deciphering the secrets of the nature of dark matter or a split-finger fastball.

Although calculating the momentum needed to propel a football 60 yards or a baseball 60 feet six inches will never result in Nobel Prize consideration the way his neutrino research might, Dr. Jung's "The Physics of Sports" classes will introduce hundreds of students to the beauty, elegance, and excitement of science for the first and, for some, the last time. And-some would argue-that, in its own way, is equally important.