[John Kirk]

My father worked his entire career at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, a high energy physics lab affiliated with the university.  One of my father's contributions was to help establish the tradition of an annual softball game.  After the game, everyone would go to Dr. Sidney Drell's house on campus for beer, sodas and snacks.  There was a kid's game most years, and when some of us got big enough, we got to play in the main game.

The game was always the "Theorists" versus the "Experimentalists".  There are two main types of high energy physicists.  Theoretical physicists use math and physics to try and explain experimental data.  Experimental physicists are the ones who gather and interpret data, both in controlled experiments and observed phenomena (go to Wikipedia for a better explanation).  The two disciplines often overlap, but not for the purpose of selecting softball teams.

The game itself was a combination of reasonably adept Americans, combined with a large contingent of foreign physicists to which softball was very foreign.  Many came from countries which played cricket, though that did not seem to help much.  "Run, RUN!  No, the other way!", is my favorite way to describe it.  Great memories.

Over the last couple months, TEPaul, Paul Cowley, Pete Pallotta, and a few other guys have been delving deeply into architecture.  It reminded me of theorists and experimentalists, and how the terms apply nicely to our group.  Theorists are the guys who study the game in theory, what should and shouldn't work, and why.  In addition to the three already mentioned, I'll add the following:

Bayley
Crosby
Some of the young fellas who like to draw holes, like Wall


Experimentalists use their experiences to draw conclusions.  Even though I'm known here for a time theory, I'm clearly an experimentalist.  I play and offer my opinion.  I'll put a few others in my category, though I think most of us belong here:

Ward
Morrison
Bernhardt
Lichtenstein

Guys like Mucci, Sullivan and Kavanaugh are immersed in both sides of the study.  Where do you belong?

Google Sidney Drell to find out more about this most impressive man.  More often than not, there were a couple of Nobel Prize winners on that softball field each year.

[Tony Ristola]

Experimentalist. Experimentalist golf architecture in its purest form would be creating on the ground (after establishing a routing) sans plans. This isn't quite where I'd fit, as plans are necessary to some degree; in some places to the 9th degree.

To me a theoretical physicist (golf architect) would be someone who believes they can set their plans to paper and walk away for long periods. Deducing most everything to paper (mathematics); Remembering what a new member here wrote about a decade ago about plans and planning, Jim Engh comes to mind.

John,
Small world.
One of my in-laws family worked at the Genf accelerator and I'm positive he spent time at Stanford. He's been retired for a handful of years. I'll have to ask him about the ball games, Dr. Drell, and what team he was on when I see him next time. He looks like an experimentalist but if his family background is any indication, he'd be a theorist. Then again, his brothers and sisters run across the board... will be interesting to find out.

[Rich Goodale]

John

I'm not sure if this thread is going anywhere, as to try to make out GCA as some sort of rocket science (Experimental, or Theoretical or Both) is doomed to failure.  After all, it's just a bloody game!

Your 1st pass at classifications highlights the folly of the exercise.  Tom Paul is no more a theoretician than is Paris Hilton.  To compare two GCAer's of similar game and level of passion, Gib Papazian could theoretize the pants off Tom Paul (if he already has not already done so) even though Tom, through his tremendous experiential skills would probably beat Gib in any match when the two of them were playing at their peak.

I'm willing to hear more, however.

Rich

PS--I can't stop laughing at the concept of a softball game between two groups of physicists.  The score each year had to be either 0-0, infinity-infinity or some combination of the two, depending on whether either or both teams managed to recruit a competent shortstop.

Oh yeah, they'd need a decent 1st baseman too.  The experimentalists would struggle as every candidate would be trying to activate their palm tops to calculate the consequences of apparent acceleration and mass as the throw came toward him (or her) with the result that few 6-3 outs would occur.  The potential theoriticist 1st basemen, on the other hand would probably be sitting on the grass and looking at the clouds when the throw came from deep in the hole.

Was there a time limit on those "games?"

[JESII]

What a great start to the day...reading that opening post. thanks John...and the company you put me in (or is there another Sullivan I haven't met?), what a group. It would appear to be a great start to a foursome...I wonder if there is any chance we could get a fourth though...certainly some spectators...

"Run, RUN!  No, the other way!", is my favorite way to describe it.

Hysterical!

[Mike Sweeney]

Jaka and Pat are Provocateurs, but Theorists is a stretch!

I am 100% Experimentalist.

[paul cowley]

John:

The Observational Theorists versus the Experimental Analysts?

[Jeff_Brauer]

I think anyone answering this thread is a gca theorist.  

This site also has a few gca terrorists.....so close and yet so far apart! (sorry, couldn't resist the theoretically experimental word play......)  

[Tom Huckaby]

I love Rich's take on this.  And his thoughts on two teams of physicists playing softball... man that had me ROLLING!

 

That was a candidate for post of the year.

But as for the substance, I'm with Rich:  it's just a game, John!  I really believe the heavier one gets into it, the sillier he looks.

So I am neither Theorist nor Experimentalist, and it also cracks me up that those are capitalized.

I just play the bloody game (not enough) and like to talk about it (way too much).  I feel silly nearly every day about this.  But I console myself in that at least I don't spend my life worrying about what Max Behr said or did 50 years before I was born.

 

[Dan Kelly]

Typically, I'm a dilettante -- a mixture of dilettante Theorist and dilettante Experimentalist.

But the truth is: I'm neither. I'm just a very simple guy who likes to talk about golf, including its courses.

I side with Rich here: It ain't rocket science (IMO)!

P.S. As it happens, my nephew is a Ph.D. candidate in theoretical physics at Stanford. The young man is a pretty fair athlete (albeit a lousy golfer), who was something of a star on his high-school baseball team.

So if there's any action on this game the next few years, I'd put my money on the Theoreticians.

[Tom Huckaby]

Dan Kelly:

I have to believe our posts crossed in cyberspace... no way you intentionally come out on this EXACTLY the same as me, right?

I like the way you put it though, which is also how I'd characterize myself:  I too am just a simple guy who likes to talk about golf, including its courses.

Well put.

But I believe you just issued a challenge to the Stanford Experimentalists... they too can find ringers.

TH

[Dan Kelly]

... no way you intentionally come out on this EXACTLY the same as me, right?

Perish the thought!

The time when I intentionally come out on something exactly the same as ANYONE else is the time when I hand in my Human Being license.

Never forget the line I live by -- my favorite line from my favorite writer, E.B. White: "I am a member of a party of one."

[Tom Huckaby]

Dan:

As expected.  I never doubted you.

Somehow however I do take comfort in siding with you AND Rich Goodale.  

[Tony_Muldoon]

Dan:

As expected.  I never doubted you.

Somehow however I do take comfort in siding with you AND Rich Goodale.  

And there are still people out there who don't believe that Christmas is a special time..."Group HuG"

[Tom Huckaby]

Tony - that wasn't meant to be as warm as it seems.  But one has to know the history to get it.  My bad, inside jokes are not cool.

Let's just say that Rich tends to have little respect for my opinions... or to put it better, has tended to disagree with me 15 times for every time he agrees.

 

[John Kirk]

Just an analogy to posit there are two ways to analyze golf.  I think it's a pretty accurate one.  Mostly it served as a way to tell the softball story.

As far as the complexity of golf, if anyone here can describe mathematically what happens when a golf ball is struck with a slightly glancing blow at 100 mph, based on the material characteristics of the ball and club, yielding a launch angle of x degrees and a spin rate of y rpm, with a three dimensional, or spherical axis of rotation, and how that ball is affected by a wind speed of j mph at sea level air pressure, and when that ball strikes the firm, fast turf with a coefficient of restitution of v, well, then I want to know about it.  The physics of golf are exceptionally complicated, and that is one of the charms of the game.

But you can just play the game, if that's all you care about.

[Tom Huckaby]

John:

That is pretty much all I care about.  I truly could care less about the physics of the game.

But my Dad was an English teacher.  Perhaps if he was a theoretical physicist I'd think differently.  

It's all good, my friend.  I do think we tend to get carried away with things here, and it does remain a game, and while the physics of why a golf ball does the things it does surely can be put up there with rocket science, our need to know about them is about the same as our need to know why they could put a man on the moon.  For most of us, the fact it happens is enough.

In any case I did love the softball story, and if this was just a means to tell it, then again, BRAVO!

In any seriousness I can't with a straight face call myself either an Experimentalist or a Theorist, not with those terms capitalized anyway.  Though I devote much of my life to the game, it does remain that - a game.

TH

[Garland Bayley]

Since my strength in school was abstract mathematics, I find it interesting that John classifies me as theorist. In that sense it would seem to be correct. I would have to think about the question more to make a more concrete decision of where I lie in gca.

[Kirk Gill]

Can I be a theoretical yet heretical existentialist?

I'd like that to be true.

[Tom Huckaby]

I don't know Kirk... I think I'd rather be a theoretical yet heretical existenstial transcendentalist, myself.

[John Kirk]

existentialism, n.

"a chiefly 20th century philosophical movement embracing diverse doctrines but centering on analysis of individual existence in an unfathomable universe and the plight of the individual who must assume ultimate responsibility for acts of free will without any certain knowledge of what is right or wrong or good or bad"

My kind of guy.

[Tom Huckaby]

Yeah, but John, we existential transcendentalists are REALLY cool.

Transcendentalism was a group of new ideas in literature, religion, culture, and philosophy that emerged in New England in the early to middle 19th century. It is sometimes called American Transcendentalism to distinguish it from other uses of the word transcendental.

Transcendentalism began as a protest against the general state of culture and society at the time, and in particular, the state of intellectualism at Harvard and the doctrine of the Unitarian church which was taught at Harvard Divinity School. Among Transcendentalists' core beliefs was an ideal spiritual state that 'transcends' the physical and empirical and is only realized through the individual's intuition, rather than through the doctrines of established religions.

Prominent Transcendentalists included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Walt Whitman, as well as Bronson Alcott, Orestes Brownson, William Ellery Channing, Frederick Henry Hedge, Theodore Parker, George Putnam, Elizabeth Peabody, and Sophia Peabody, the wife of Nathaniel Hawthorne. For a time, Peabody and Hawthorne lived at the Brook Farm Transcendentalist utopian commune.

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendentalism"

[Garland Bayley]

In one sense, the architects here are the experimentalists, because they do the work, and the rest of us are theorists, because we just talk about it.

Another viewpoint, is that we are all experimentalists, because Mucci forces us to play before say. However, if you check my tag line, Ran would allow us to be theorists that can say without play.

I guess I have to agree that I am a theorist. I am willing to apply my theories without needing to go test them. For example, that horrendous course in Colorado by Norman that Tommy W. put a thread up about. I was barfing at my desk looking at the pictures, and have no need to go barf there in person.

I think in that last sense we can put Arble in the theorists.

[Brad Tufts]

Great question John.

I would consider myself a Experimentalist, who is trying to increase his Theorist percentage.

As much as I love/read/talk GCA theory, overall, I look at the features of a golf course related directly to my game.  I do like the perspective that I generally know where my ball is going when I hit it.  I like that my game being close to par is not taking advantage of the course like a long-bombing tour pro, nor having (too much) trouble negotiating the stated requirements of the holes.

I would assume that as I play a bit less and my game goes a bit downhill, I will be more interested in the Theorist perspective.

[John Kirk]

We're getting rather deep into this, and though the last few posts might seem unrelated, they are still pertinent.

I agree with the transcendentalists philosophy as stated, except the notion that the "ideal state transcends the empirical".  I make judgements based on experience, which identifies me as an golf architecture experimentalist.

This difference in philosophy, between the writer's son and the scientist's son, makes perfect sense.  Are you really free from the doctrine of the church?

Sorry, I have to go for a few hours.  I'll be back.

[Adam Clayman]

John, Just a few q's...

Can one be a serious theorist or experimentalist without studying all the written words ever written on the subject?

On a quality course is this formula

a golf ball is struck with a slightly glancing blow at 100 mph, based on the material characteristics of the ball and club, yielding a launch angle of x degrees and a spin rate of y rpm, with a three dimensional, or spherical axis of rotation, and how that ball is affected by a wind speed of j mph at sea level air pressure, and when that ball strikes the firm, fast turf with a coefficient of restitution of v,

longer or more complex, than on an inferior course?

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