written by Steve Aoyama, Titleist
When it comes to sporting projectiles, Golf is King. But what about
baseballs? Basketballs? Footballs? Tennis balls? Forget about it.
Nothing but concoctions of skin, bark, and hair. Where's the
technology? In golf balls, that's where. High technology materials
engineered into high precision airframes with high performance flight
capabilities.
A golf ball's performance dwarfs that of any other ball in sport: A
child can easily hit one out of a Major League ballpark and the
average adult can launch one an eighth of a mile. What makes a golf
ball fly like that? In a word, AERODYNAMICS. While other sporting
projectiles push through the air, golf balls soar through it.
The aerodynamics of the golf ball is a complicated topic. Although
scientists and others have scrutinized it for over a century, the
topic remained largely a mystery until perhaps the last 20 or 25
years. But even today, some of the details still defy analysis by
supercomputer, let alone your 98 pound Pentium 166. It is one aspect
of a golf ball's engineering that remains, in part, a technological
art.
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