Golf Ball Deforming on Impact

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMqM13EUSKw

Each of us has our own understanding of the laws of physics. These beliefs are formed through personal experience (falling out of a tree), classroom education (an apple falls out of a tree) and much more. My own experience has taught me that the way we experience physics everyday is not the whole story, it is simply the way things are under “normal conditions”: change these conditions and everything can change. In relation to this, most people would say that golf balls are solid objects. However, as shown in this brief clip, fire one hard enough at another solid object, and it starts to display some very liquid properties. In real-time this deformation would be too quick to see, giving a truly educational example of the gulf that exists between our perception and reality.

Interestingly, as an avid golfer I have seen photos of golf balls deforming on impact, but the extent of the deformation shown here really took me by surprise. I would guess that the speed of impact is significantly higher than the 160km/h that good golfers can achieve

One thought on “Golf Ball Deforming on Impact”

  1. Following some discussions on this video, I decided to do some research into it, and ended up finding some interesting information. Fristly, there is a lot of debate as to how genuine the clip is, with plenty of people happy to cry “fake”.

    However, I am not sure that this is the case. A number of sites (including this one) claim that the video is shot at 70,000 fps and shows a golf ball fired at 150m/h (roughly 240km/h) which is faster than my impact but slower than Tiger Woods. A lot of the evidence suggested in favour of a fake says that other videos do not show such deformation. This is a logical line to argue, but is countered by the idea that the video uses a steel plate, which would compress less than a golf club face, explaining the extreme deformation shown. There is also the issue that the impact was perpendicular to the face, whereas with a golf club it would be oblique.

    Probably the most reliable information I could find came from an academic paper studying this exact topic. The set of images included in the study show a ball travelling at 219km/h and striking a steel plate in a perpendicular fashion. These images show similar bevaviour to the video, but at a far smaller degree, leading, as far as I can see, to the following three possible conclusions:

    1. The video is “fake”.
    2. The golf ball is considerably more elastic than a regulation ball.
    3. The speed of impact is considerably higher than the suggested 240km/h.

    Personally I think that a combination of 2 and 3 are at work, but then I am definitely predisposed to believe my senses! Interestingly, almost all of the sites I looked at in relation to this called for impartial testing by the Mythbusters team, which seems to have replaced universities as the place to go for real answers.

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