Gay played some of his clips to the colloquium audience, emphasizing that although scientific ideas are simplified by squeezing them into one-minute spots, he hopes his efforts helped raise scientific literacy. "It's important for a working physicist to try to communicate to the public why what we're doing is exciting, why it's important and why they should be interested as well," he said.

Before the first big-screen physics lessons ran, Gay said he experienced a "Carl Sagan phobia" about popularizing science. "There was a concern I had that if I started doing this, people would stop taking me seriously as a physicist," said Gay, whose research is focused on electron scattering. The stadium physics lessons ended in 2003, after seasons of support from the crowd and his colleagues.

Gay continues to make "Football Physics" demonstrations to groups of cub scouts and other organizations, using a melon and a football to show impulse and a runner's mass and acceleration to demonstrate force. "When I do this with cub scouts, probably 90 percent of them understand 20 percent of what I say," he said. "But that's OK, because we got them thinking."

—Kendra Snyder

In a strange reversal, astronomers have detected a massive black hole but can find no traces of the surrounding galaxy that should be feeding it.

At the center of most large galaxies, our own Milky Way included, are extremely dense black holes that have masses hundreds of millions times that of the Sun.
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