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Aircraft, ships, racing boats, bullet trains, and Formula One racing cars are all subject to the same laws of physics, the same as your golf ball. The distance a ball travels after impact is determined primarily by the speed of the clubhead at the moment of impact. Mass is also a factor but limitations on clubhead size and weight mean that driver heads in particular are about as big and heavy as they are going to get both because the USGA wants it that way and because there is just a practical limit on the size of the golf club your average golfer could swing consistently.
Although modern golf balls are marvels of chemistry there is one aspect of ball research and design that is only now beginning to take scientific baby steps. For a golf ball, just like a Formula One racing car, aerodynamic drag has a big effect on the speed that the ball can travel through the air while gravity tries to drag it down to earth. Gravity always wins of course but research physicists at Arizona State University and the University of Maryland are using supercomputers to model the effects of aerodynamic drag on a golf ball in flight.
The first balls were made from gutta percha and stuffed with horse hair. Some enterprising low handicaper for his time determined that gutta percha golf balls that had been roughed up a little bit traveled further and straighter than the smooth skin new balls. His advantage time was short-lived because every other golfer soon figured out that they were regularly getting trounced by the golfers with the dirty balls that seemed to fly about twice as far and stayed a lot straighter too. If you have ever played on a Scottish golf course you know that you do not want to ever be off the fairway.
One thing led to another and soon enough golf manufacturers were experimenting with all kinds of dimple patterns and designs for their golf balls. Golf ball dimples have been more of an art form than a science because the technology needed to model how air flows around a golf ball in flight has not been available.
You would think that it must be a simple thing but the researchers tell us that even today a usable aerodynamic model requires 300 hours of computing time on a parallel computer with 500 processors. That's amazing when you consider that your desktop computer with a Pentium 4 processor is more powerful than third generation Cray supercomputers which were so expensive when they were made that only governments could afford them.
So where are we in the dimple development department? The scientists say that it will take years of computer time to get enough information to get much further beyond what the golf ball manufacturers have done entirely by trial and error. Well, maybe if we canceled the Mars mission...
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