I’ve been seeing a lot of shark-festooned teal shirts at my train station in San Jose, home of the Sharks hockey team. Tonight is a crucial game in the Western conference play-offs and fans are rallying to help keep the home team alive (the Detroit Red-Wings are ahead in the series 3-2).

I’m a bit of a fair-weather hockey fan, short on real knowledge of the game, so I wandered next door to the office of one of the Exploratorium’s senior scientists Thomas Humphrey, a physicist, hockey player and all around walking encyclopedia, to chat about the sport. Thomas is featured in a Science of Hockey website, along with some Shark’s players. It’s a great place to collect some interesting trivia, or explore the physics behind all that action on the ice, in case you’re short on conversation topics during game breaks in the Stanley Cup playoffs.

I asked Tom why the players have to wear so much protective gear, making them to my eye much lumpier looking than even football players. Tom explained that it’s protection against hockey pucks, which can fly across the ice at speeds exceeding 100 mph and also the incredible crushing force of two two-hundred pound players slamming into each other on the boards (the website has a program that lets you calculate the force each player experiences in that charming maneuver known as a body check).

One recent development is that professional hockey sticks are all curved now, rather than the traditional straight sticks that Tom plays with. The curve means that shooting is more accurate and the puck spends more time in contact with the stick which means it can gather more momentum (and thus speed) flying off the end. The puck actually rolls along the inside curve of the stick rather than bouncing off like a tennis ball from a tennis racket. This puzzled me a little, so Tom drew a picture (scroll below). Whenever you talk with a physicist, it’s always handy to have a scrap of paper and a pen handy–they generally love to draw diagrams to explain things.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 7th, 2007 at 2:03 pm and is filed under Explo Blogs, exploratorium, physics, sport science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.