Uploaded July 2026 | Updated September 2026, 5 days ago
A bending soccer kick. A slicing golf shot. A tennis ball that sinks as it crosses the net. They’re all the result of the Magnus effect, rooted in Bernoulli’s principle.
“Whenever the motion of air over an object is slow, the pressure is high,” explains John Lambropoulos, a professor in URochester’s Department of Mechanical Engineering. “When the motion of air around an object is fast, the pressure is low. The difference in pressure creates a force that will make the ball swerve.”
That force is the Magnus effect, and spinning is essential to creating it, emphasizes Lambropoulos. The faster a ball spins, the greater the pressure differential and the more it will bend. If a ball is spinning on its vertical access, it will curve to the left or right. If the spin occurs on the horizontal access, the ball will sink or rise.
The phenomenon is named after the 19th-century German physicist Heinrich Gustav Magnus; however, he didn’t discover it. Lambropoulos points out the effect was observed centuries before Magnus, most notably by polymath Isaac Newton at Cambridge University, who noticed that spinning tennis balls travel along a curved path. Magnus became the eponym because he was the scientist who formally studied and explained the effect—the same reason the world refers to Newton’s laws and Bernoulli’s principle.
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A bending soccer kick. A slicing golf shot. A tennis ball that sinks as it crosses the net. They’re all the result of the Magnus effect, rooted in Bernoulli’s principle.
“Whenever the motion of air over an object is slow, the pressure is high,” explains John Lambropoulos, a professor in URochester’s Department of Mechanical Engineering. “When the motion of air around an object is fast, the pressure is low. The difference in pressure creates a force that will make the ball swerve.”
That force is the Magnus effect, and spinning is essential to creating it, emphasizes Lambropoulos. The faster a ball spins, the greater the pressure differential and the more it will bend. If a ball is spinning on its vertical access, it will curve to the left or right. If the spin occurs on the horizontal access, the ball will sink or rise.
The phenomenon is named after the 19th-century German physicist Heinrich Gustav Magnus; however, he didn’t discover it. Lambropoulos points out the effect was observed centuries before Magnus, most notably by polymath Isaac Newton at Cambridge University, who noticed that spinning tennis balls travel along a curved path. Magnus became the eponym because he was the scientist who formally studied and explained the effect—the same reason the world refers to Newton’s laws and Bernoulli’s principle.
Subscribe to the University of Rochester on YouTube: youtube.com/user/UniversityRochester?sub_confirmation=1
