[Mike_Cirba]

Examples?

Dan,

I'm holding an envelope with the names of the accursed violators of cerebral golf.  

Until I deem it an appropriate time to release it publicly, I'd much rather posture pointedly at anonymous shadowy figures lurking in the deepest recesses of GCA.

They know who they are.  

MIke

[TEPaul]

"Glad you have such a high opinion of my education, research, and career.  "


Well, don't worry about it Garland. I guess when it comes to golf course architecture you just happened to stumble down the same wrong road Josh Crane did. It's never too late to hang a U turn and at least get back to the intersection where you made the mistake.
 

[TEPaul]

You guys lost me somewhere around post #15. I'm too dumb for discussions like this. But the good news is I'm not as dumb as Richard Farnsworth Goodale.

[John Kirk]

I was approaching this from a purely physical standpoint.  I had not considered the emotional component of the game, and many of us here tend to judge our satisfaction on the quality of the course we are playing.  There are those who find happiness by playing well.

I've looked up more words in the dictionary for this thread than any previous thread.  Thanks for that.

"Golf shots that begin at point A and finish near point B, where the initial angle the player plays away from point B is significant, tend to give the player great satisfaction."  There's a theory based on experimentation that addresses emotional state.

For those naysayers, we here at GolfClubAtlas.com are on the cutting edge of golf architecture research, developing a framework for architects who follow in our wake.  Soon will come a day when the average golf course will be a Doak 7, as we lift the game to new heights of enjoyment.  Concepts like "It's a Hanse, for crying out loud!" and "It's a Fazio, for crying out loud!" move the art form forward.

I stand by my initial statement that there are theorists and experimentalists here, and our group is blessed with a handful of guys that really enjoy breaking the game down.  It was Paul Cowley's post on the basic shapes of golf holes that prompted the initial post.  As far as taking this seriously, under muffled laughter I proclaim that golf is a game and if there were no golf I'd find something else to do.

[TEPaul]

Hey, John, what is the possibility that the math used by Newton or Einstein or Hawkings is just flat-ass wrong?

What is the possibility that Euclid was just another street smart bullshitter?

What is the possibility that that Stanford Linear Accelerator your dad worked on is nothing but some big grown up toy?

What is the possibility that one of these days Mother Nature and her universe just does a sharp left turn on us and right into complete randomness? (If that happens I suspect she'll do it just for laughs because we think we're so smart).

If you don't happen to know the answers to any of those questions just go with your gut FEELING.

That'll do.

[Garland Bayley]

Hey, John, what is the possibility that the math used by Newton or Einstein or Hawkings is just flat-ass wrong?
...

For Newton and Einstein, 100% and they knew it.
They knew where it fell down. That is why Hawkings and others are working on string theory, to solve the know failures of Newton and Einstein. It remains to be seen how wrong Hawkings and his fellows will be.

[Garland Bayley]

"Glad you have such a high opinion of my education, research, and career.  "


Well, don't worry about it Garland. I guess when it comes to golf course architecture you just happened to stumble down the same wrong road Josh Crane did. It's never too late to hang a U turn and at least get back to the intersection where you made the mistake.
 

I have not stumbled down the same wrong road that Josh Crane did. Josh Crane's methods were too naieve to have any credibility today. However, new methods are developed that bring us closer. I doubt todays methods will get us there, but their shortcomings will be exposed, and new methods will be created to overcome the shortcomings. It is called advancement.

I have to ask you if you ever imagined when you were young  (what is that? some 100 years ago? ) that you would one day carry round a small device in your pocket that you could take out and say "call Gary Player" to it and shortly be talking to Gary Player in South Africa with it. Or was that just more BS to you?

[Adam Clayman]

This thread will have achieved a great purpose if it has opened the eyes of those who previously poo poo'd the mysterious aspects of the sport.

Now everybody...

Feelings, whoa whoa whoa feelings....


 

[JohnV]

Pete,

You asked, "Theoretically, could one design and build a golf course on a mobius strip?"

Yes, they could, it just couldn't be called Mobius Hills...

I find this quite interesting as a mobius strip is perfectly suited to be a course with returning nines with the clubhouse in the middle.

Philip, how do you get to the back side?

[Garland Bayley]

Pete,

You asked, "Theoretically, could one design and build a golf course on a mobius strip?"

Yes, they could, it just couldn't be called Mobius Hills...

I find this quite interesting as a mobius strip is perfectly suited to be a course with returning nines with the clubhouse in the middle.

Philip, how do you get to the back side?

He must have used a vibrating string.

[JohnV]

The only way that my game resembles physics is that they both have an Uncertainty Principle.

[TEPaul]

"However, new methods are developed that bring us closer."

Garland:

Yeah, RIGHT. That's also exactly what Joshua Crane said!

[TEPaul]

"I have to ask you if you ever imagined when you were young  (what is that? some 100 years ago?  ) that you would one day carry round a small device in your pocket that you could take out and say "call Gary Player" to it and shortly be talking to Gary Player in South Africa with it. Or was that just more BS to you?"

Garland:

What exactly does that have to do with the importance of emotions and feelings toward golf courses and golf architecture?

My hunch is---almost precisely nothing!

[Norbert P]

 Fun string (theory).

 I am a theorist when I am not golfing - with plenty of ideas of how golf should be played on what kind of playing fields.

I am an experimentalist when I am golfing - with lots of explosions and complex math to prove it.

The Mobius Strip . . .
 The Mobius Strip

[Marty Bonnar]

Given the membership of this delightful place, I am surprised we haven't yet mentioned the Klein Bottle.
Now there's a properly one-dimensional object (the bottle, that is... )

F.

[paul cowley]

Fun string (theory).

 I am a theorist when I am not golfing - with plenty of ideas of how golf should be played on what kind of playing fields.

I am an experimentalist when I am golfing - with lots of explosions and complex math to prove it.

The Mobius Strip . . .
 The Mobius Strip

....ah ...the mobius strip.

When I first encountered it as a younger person I almost thought it magic.

But now I get to design a golf course on it, one with returning nines...here goes:

Look to the right of the strip and find where it is connected...and lets call this the clubhouse.

Now follow one side around until you return to the clubhouse, but you will be on the opposite side of the strip from where you started....that concludes the front nine.

Now continue along the same side of the strip until you once again return to the clubhouse...and notice that you have returned on the same side of the strip that you started from...that concludes the back nine...and my first routing on a mobius strip...something that would have been hard for me to imagine as a youngster

[paul cowley]

...now John, please tell me if this little exercise is either theoretical or experimental?

[John Kirk]

Well, I'd say it's theoretical.  There are gravitational constraints.  You can't golf upside down.

How did we get here?

TEP,

There is nothing wrong with evalutaing golf from a quantitative standpoint.  At the end of the day, an experienced golfer knows how golf balls react, whether they know the math or not.  It certainly doesn't hurt to understand it, and in the case of golf equipment manufacturers and governing bodies, it is essential information.

The leading questions you pose seem intended to suggest that I'm foolish to be so sure of myself with regards to the nature of things.  I don't even know the shortcomings of Newton's laws.  But in the context of discussing the physics of golf, the mathematics typically used to describe thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, momentum, energy transfer, and the like, work very accurately.  How am I so sure?  Because of a different science, statistics.  After the first trillion tries where there are no exceptions, you can say with a great deal of certainty that it is so.

So you've hit a bit of a sore spot, because science is under siege in this country, for political and religious reasons.  Many scientists have complained their work is being stifled.  I believe this is a big mistake.

The answers to your questions are:

1) No, Newton and Einstein are not flat ass wrong, most of their theories continue to be supported by the data, I have no idea about Hawkings, though I've also heard string world theory may not be relevant
2)  No. Euclid was smart and brave
3)  No. SLAC was not a toy.  They discovered tons of new physics, though it didn't yield any useful applications that I know of, unless you consider the fact they were instrumental in the early days of the Internet.
4)  None.  The laws of Mother Nature will never change.  If they do, I owe you a dollar.

[Norbert P]

 You've probably heard of the Chris Comer fiasco in Texas but here is an exerpt . . .

 "
The latest on the Comer controversy

"We were actually told in a meeting in September that if creationism is the party line, we have to abide by it," the former director of science curriculum for the Texas Education Agency told the Austin American-Statesman (December 6, 2007). Chris Comer, who was forced to resign from her position with the TEA in November 2007, related that over the past year, the TEA began increasingly to scrutinize and constrain the activities of its employees in the curriculum department: "We couldn't go anywhere. We couldn't speak," she said. "They just started wanting everything to be channeled." According to the newspaper, Comer maintained "that her ouster was political and that she felt persecuted for having supported the teaching of evolution in Texas classrooms."

As NCSE reported earlier, Comer was forced to resign after forwarding a brief e-mail announcing a talk on "intelligent design" by Barbara Forrest to several individuals and two e-mail discussion groups used by science educators. A spokesperson for the TEA was quoted by the American-Statesman as saying, "Obviously, there was a concern about the forwarding of that e-mail ... that she was supporting that particular speaker and [how] that could be construed ... as taking a position that could be misinterpreted by some people," and as contending that Comer evinced a lack of professionalism in other ways. Until her resignation, Comer served for nine years at the TEA, following a twenty-seven-year stint as a public school science teacher."

[Jim Nugent]

If quantum theory is right, all of us here at GCA are both experimentalists and theorists.  

Of course, quantum theory has never been reconciled with relativity theory.  They contradict each other.

And then there's Goedel, who basically proved it's all hopeless anyway...

[Garland Bayley]

...
And then there's Goedel, who basically proved it's all hopeless anyway...

Shh, Jim, you weren't supposed to let Tom know about Goedel.
 

[Garland Bayley]

1) No, Newton and Einstein are not flat ass wrong, most of their theories continue to be supported by the data, I have no idea about Hawkings, though I've also heard string world theory may not be relevant

This depends on whether you think Tom was asking whether they were universally correct or not. Since he had mentioned the work trying to overcome the lack of universality of their work, I assumed Tom was posing the universality question.

[John Kirk]

...at this point I have very little idea what I'm talking about, Garland.  Except that golf can be accurately described by the standard methods.

Good morning.

[Garland Bayley]

"However, new methods are developed that bring us closer."

Garland:

Yeah, RIGHT. That's also exactly what Joshua Crane said!

You understand that I am not refering to mathematical methods don't you? I know this thread is physics and math, so I am just checking whether you had that misconception since I did not make clear that the new methods were not mathematical.

[Garland Bayley]

Good morning John,

Pretty heavy frost last night, I doubt I'll get on the greens today.

The mathematical description of what you can observe about golf is accurate with respect to Newtonian physics. It is what is going on at the level of the minutia that you can not directly observe that is not described properly by Newton and Einstein.

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