Belichick got the science right. Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye blew it!

Neil DeGrasse Tyson bungles science of Deflate-gate scandal

Tyson made a simple error in his calculations.

Bill Nye also screwed up his reaction to deflate-gate. Nye said "to really change the pressure, you need one of these, an inflation needle." That is incorrect. The temperature will also change the pressure, as Belichick explained, and as anyone knows who has ever owned a car in an area which experiences winter conditions (tire air pressure drops considerably when it gets colder). Yes, you already know this, but if you want the details, you can go to pretty much any page on Goodyear's web site, which says repeatedly: "NOTE: Air pressure in a tire goes up (in warm weather) or down (in cold weather) 1–2 pounds for every 10 degrees of temperature change."

If you are a nerd like me and care about the precise calculations, it goes something like this:

The balls were inflated to 27.2 PSi (12.5 gauge pressure plus 14.7 atmospheric pressure). I'm going to assume that they were inflated in a room where the temperature was 75 degrees Fahrenheit, or 297 Kelvin. The temperature on the field at halftime (when the balls were confiscated) was 47 degrees, or 281.5 Kelvin. Since all other factors affecting air pressure were constant, therefore, the pressure should have declined to 94.8 percent of its original amount (281.5 divided by 297). 94.8% of 27.2 is 25.8 total pressure, or 11.1 gauge pressure. In other words, the balls should theoretically have declined by an average of 1.4 PSi to 11.1 PSi.

I made no effort to adjust for rainy conditions. A testing lab in Pittsburgh actually ran the experiment with real footballs rather than my theoretical ones, simulated game conditions, and found that the footballs dropped by an average of 1.8 PSI.

The strange, sad part of this experiment is that Bill Belichick got the science right, while Neil Tyson and Bill Nye got it wrong. It's strange because it shows that friggin' Belichick really is some kind of evil genius. It's sad because those two guys are our country's official public metaphors for scientific genius, which is a sad comment on the state of education in our country.

In Nye's defense, he is NOT a science guy. His undergraduate degree was in engineering, and he has no advanced degrees in any subject. He's actually Bill Nye the entertainment guy.

Tyson, however, is a real scientist with a Ph.D in astrophysics - and just plain screwed up. In Tyson's defense, this is not an astrophysics problem, but it is covered in basic high school physics.

By the way, I am not a Patriots fan. I am about as far from it as possible. But the facts are the facts.