#ICYMI - Golf Science, with Geoff Ogilvy and Neil deGrasse Tyson

Aerodynamics, Doppler radar, laser tracking, and big data! Gary and Chuck find out how science has guided the evolution of golf, from why balls have dimples to how clubs are designed, with astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson and, from the PGA Tour, 3x world golf champion Geoff Ogilvy. Don’t miss an episode of Playing with Science. Subscribe to our channels on: TuneIn: tunein.com/playingwithscience Apple Podcasts: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/playing-with-science/id1198280360 GooglePlay Music: https://play.google.com/music/listen?u=0#/ps/Iimke5bwpoh2nb25swchmw6kzjq SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/startalk_playing-with-science Stitcher: http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/startalk/playing-with-science NOTE: StarTalk All-Access subscribers can watch or listen to this entire episode commercial-free: https://www.startalkradio.net/all-access/golf-science-with-geoff-ogilvy-and-neil-degrasse-tyson/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:10Speaker 00

  I'm Gary O'Reilly.

• 0:10Speaker 01

  And I'm Chuck Knotts.

• 0:11Speaker 00

  And this is Playing with Science. Today, we have to drive ourselves, bring our own chips, and I will get my own tea, which will be splendid. Ah, yes, we will be accountable for our own scores and things could get a little rough.

• 0:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, but never fear. Ogilvy is here in the shape of Jeff Ogilvy, a golfer who is, in his time, ranked number four in the world and owner of not one, not two, not three, yes, three world championships.

• 0:42Speaker 00

  And lest we forget today's smooth operator, who is all back of the golf buggy with his feet up, it's, of course, our very own Neil deGrasse Tyson. Well, let's get straight to it, shall we? Up on the first tee, Jeff Ogilvy, a man who won the US Open in 2006. Jeff, welcome to Playing with Science.

• 1:01Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 1:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:02Speaker 01

  And we also have with us.

• 1:04Speaker 00

  Oh, don't we?

• 1:05Speaker 01

  Yes, the man himself, the myth, the legend. I have just decided.

• 1:10Speaker 00

  Have you?

• 1:10Speaker 01

  To start calling him Rocket Man. Rocket Man is here with us. And it's none other than our very own Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 1:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I need a haircut if I'm gonna be Rocket Man. I need a new do.

• 1:26Speaker 00

  You need extensions and all sorts of work for that. But anyway.

• 1:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, just a quick thing. You said not one, but two, but three.

• 1:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There are certain tribes in the world that do not count anything beyond three.

• 1:38Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's just one, two, three, and then many.

• 1:41Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, there's just no, they don't care.

• 1:44Speaker 02

  It's quite sensible, isn't it?

• 1:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, four, or 50, or 100, it's just more than what I care about.

• 1:49Speaker 00

  More than three, right.

• 1:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 1:49Speaker 00

  More than I can get in my hands. Yeah.

• 1:51Speaker 02

  We work with golf. Three is good in golf.

• 1:53Speaker 01

  It's good in golf, yes, it is.

• 1:55Speaker 02

  We might move there.

• 1:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. And by the way, that means you have to win just one more championship, Jeff, and then it'll just be many.

• 2:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Many.

• 2:02Speaker 02

  Many, yeah.

• 2:03Speaker 01

  Right. It's just like, how many champions do you have?

• 2:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Many.

• 2:06Speaker 01

  Many.

• 2:07Speaker 00

  Okay, so you're here in New York, and I'm... Thinking because you got lovely cap and a sweater on that it's all about the president's cup. So let us know exactly what's going on.

• 2:17Speaker 01

  What is the president's cup?

• 2:18Speaker 00

  Yes, please.

• 2:18Speaker 01

  Because some of our listeners are just sports fans, but they're maybe just discovering golf. So what is it?

• 2:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  President of what?

• 2:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whose president's cup is it?

• 2:27Speaker 01

  I'm the president of golf. That's right. Okay, sorry.

• 2:31Speaker 02

  Well, I guess if you've been on this planet for a while, I guess you probably have heard of something called the Ryder Cup.

• 2:38Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 2:39Speaker 02

  Which is

• 2:40Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 2:40Speaker 02

  Basically, the European tour versus the US tour in golf.

• 2:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:45Speaker 02

  Um, kind of a bragging rights kind of thing. It's been going on for a really long time. And that's become a really, really big event. Um, but that's owned by the PGA of America, the PGA Tour, which is really kind of the powerful organization, which kind of runs the tour on a regular basis, kind of wanted to get in on the mix. So they created their own thing called the President's Cup, which is the US team versus everyone else in the world except for Europe, which is quite a lot of good golfers.

• 3:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:10Speaker 02

  Generally, there's four or five of the top 10 in the world of this, out of that sort of area of the world. So Tour created this event, I think in the early 90s. Um, this is about nine or 10 now. It's every two years, every other Ryder Cup year. So it's, um, this year at Liberty National, which is staring at the Statue of Liberty and the skyline of New York.

• 3:30Speaker 01

  And happens to be the very best golf club in the world outside of any other golf club I own. So sorry.

• 3:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's one of those.

• 3:41Speaker 00

  That was well done, Jeff.

• 3:42Speaker 02

  We're staying, uh.

• 3:44Speaker 01

  Good man, this guy, he knows what he's doing.

• 3:45Speaker 02

  We're staying down, um, kind of Wall Street way and we battery park, we get the ferry every day.

• 3:50Speaker 01

  Yes, beautiful.

• 3:51Speaker 02

  If anyone, uh, ever wants to see professional golfers actually get truly passionate, go to a president's cup or Ryder Cup, because it means a lot more when you're playing for.

• 4:01Speaker 00

  Who's gonna win? One word answer.

• 4:02Speaker 02

  Internationals.

• 4:03Speaker 00

  There you go.

• 4:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  President, does it refer to?

• 4:06Speaker 02

  All of the above.

• 4:08Speaker 00

  Right.

• 4:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The presidents.

• 4:09Speaker 00

  The many's.

• 4:10Speaker 01

  Of every president that's ever been.

• 4:12Speaker 02

  Forty five of them.

• 4:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Forty five of them. Oh, of, oh, it's American president's cup.

• 4:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, okay. I'm sorry.

• 4:17Speaker 00

  All right, that's cool.

• 4:18Speaker 02

  They had to have a name and it was a good name. The president's didn't have one, so now they've got one.

• 4:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 4:22Speaker 00

  Has there been one thing in your career as a professional that you've gone that really changed the game? And it's kind of like the science, the technology that really thought that's really elevated it.

• 4:31Speaker 02

  Oh, wow. Yeah. Um, I mean, there might not be a sport that's had the. Kind of money thrown at R and D that golf has.

• 4:40Speaker 00

  Uh huh.

• 4:40Speaker 02

  Uh, equipment, biomechanics and physiology, psychology, turf management. I mean, it's,

• 4:49Speaker 02

  it's an amazing sport for the science and the research side of things, but the technology with the ball and the driver, the equipment especially has been, it's, it's a completely different sport we're playing now than it was, say 20 years ago.

• 4:59Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 4:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, but there are many sports where you introduce a new technology and everyone says, oh, can't do that. That's not traditional. We got to go back to the way it used to. Is golf just completely open to whatever will improve the game from one year to the next? Or is there some tribunal that is saying, no, no, no, no, no?

• 5:14Speaker 02

  It's interesting. I mean, there are ruling bodies that seem to be the tribunal and they kind of control the show like they do in the world, you know, big brother up there. But uh, there's a debate, I guess. I mean, golf was the same for a really long time on really old school golf courses.

• 5:28Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 5:29Speaker 02

  Played with woods and kind of almost handmade stuff.

• 5:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 5:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Isn't that why they're called woods?

• 5:35Speaker 02

  Well, they were wooden originally.

• 5:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what I'm saying, right? So, so that's not some stretch of vocabulary.

• 5:40Speaker 02

  No, it was actually a literal uh, description. Yeah. Um, and it just, I guess the commercial, it's such a popular game, the commercial uh, kind of realization of we could sell a lot of these golf clubs and we make them go further and make them easier to hit. So.

• 5:54Speaker 01

  Right.

• 5:54Speaker 02

  Um, it's been a massive, the progress since kind of mid 1980s has been huge.

• 6:00Speaker 00

  What's taken it further, the ball or the clubs in terms of the technology and the advancement?

• 6:05Speaker 01

  And, and with that follow-up, I know you have a favorite ball and I want to know why.

• 6:10Speaker 02

  Okay. Yeah. Well, I mean, really it's a combination, probably more than anything.

• 6:14Speaker 00

  Alright.

• 6:15Speaker 02

  Because they've mastered combining balls and drivers with golfers. They kind of match the whole thing. I mean, there's a few things that go into it.

• 6:23Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 6:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, you're telling me custom drivers and custom ball?

• 6:28Speaker 02

  Well, very, very adjustable with lots of variables. So you can get different heads, different loft, different shaft, different weight, different grip.

• 6:36Speaker 00

  Different language. He's speaking in tongues now.

• 6:39Speaker 02

  And you can change it all.

• 6:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The syllables coming out of his mouth.

• 6:41Speaker 00

  See, the thing is, if you're, if you're a guy can really hit the ball a long way on a, on a drive, you're going to have a particular type of club and go with a particular type of setup on the ball because the, for a layman, you're thinking the ball is dimpled. Yes, we understand that. And they're all the same, but they're not, are they? They come in a various set, set patterns.

• 7:02Speaker 02

  They do. I mean, for all intents and purposes, I guess the better you are, the more difference the ball makes.

• 7:08Speaker 01

  Oh, now that makes sense because if you suck, it does not make a difference how dimpled or what pattern of dimple the ball has because you suck. But if you are highly proficient, those small changes to the physicality of the ball can actually become a measurable difference in your game.

• 7:28Speaker 02

  Incredible. Visible difference.

• 7:29Speaker 01

  Visible difference.

• 7:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, incredible.

• 7:31Speaker 01

  That's amazing.

• 7:31Speaker 02

  So I guess there's two, there's a few things that make a ball go far and straight. And it's, uh, speed.

• 7:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Talent.

• 7:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:40Speaker 00

  Thank you, doctor.

• 7:41Speaker 02

  Talent probably will.

• 7:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Come to me when you need, when you need this.

• 7:44Speaker 02

  The club head speed, the speed the club head is moving.

• 7:47Speaker 01

  Right.

• 7:50Speaker 02

  Where the club, the ball hits on the face. If it hits in the sweet spot or like a weaker spot, which can affect line and spin and speed and drag on the ball in the air, I guess.

• 8:01Speaker 01

  So before we go any further, since we have world renowned astrophysicist Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson sitting here, can you please break down just so that those listening can know, uh, what the effect of dimpling a ball will have? Uh, why does it make the ball go farther? And if you change the pattern of the dimple, what would that do?

• 8:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, all I know is that I, I think you should get NASA on this. So they can, you're talking about new technology. They get a ball that has little rockets in it and then it can go like five miles.

• 8:32Speaker 00

  You've been around Chuck too long.

• 8:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I still think there's improvements awaiting. But correct me if I'm wrong here, from reading the history of golf, the golf balls used to be just perfect little spheres, like any other ball we play with. And people discovered, just accidentally, really, that that highly-used balls that were all dinged and nicked were traveling farther than perfectly-new balls that had no blemishes on them at all, no nicks and dings. And so, they decided to exploit this fact and figure out what kind of nicks and dings would make it go farthest. And it turns out that the aerodynamics around a perfectly smooth ball, the air sort of hugs the surface of the ball, and when it comes to the back, creates a partial vacuum and

• 9:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  puts drag on the ball. Yeah, so it's just aerodynamic drag. But if you put dimples on it, it breaks up right on the surface of the ball, it breaks that up, so that by the time, it's a rotating ball. So by the time the air gets to the back, it doesn't create the same vacuum that it would if the ball were smooth. Now, the opposite effect is true if the ball's not spinning, but you're not, that's not, that never happens in the sport. So, the ball's not spinning, if you had a ball that looked like, you know those cone heads that they used to wear in the bicycle races?

• 9:49Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 9:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, yeah, the aerodynamic thing. If you did that, then you control that flow of air all the way to the back without any kind of drag at all. But that's not how, it's a round ball. It's not a cone head ball.

• 10:01Speaker 01

  Which, by the way, my favorite Saturday Night Live sketch, Cone Head Ball. Since we're sitting here in NBC Studios, I figured I'd bring that on.

• 10:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah, that's right. Nice, nice, nice touch there. That's all I can tell you about the ball. Now, if you're gonna have patterns of dimples on balls that have a more subtle effect than what I'm describing, then that's beyond my physics 101.

• 10:24Speaker 01

  Cool. So the dimple actually acts like-

• 10:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Don't say it's cool that I just said I'm ignorant on something.

• 10:29Speaker 01

  No, no, it's cool what you just said. And by the way, it is cool that you're ignorant on something, because I've known you long enough to know that that's a cool thing. So, Jeff, when you talk about, so Gary said there are patterns, right?

• 10:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, so the size of the dimple varies, it's not a standardized pattern around the ball, and the patterns on the dimples and such.

• 10:50Speaker 02

  No, it's generally- From what I understand, it's somewhere around 400 dimples.

• 10:56Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 10:56Speaker 02

  Somewhere around. They used to sell them with like 392 or 384, like the amount of dimples on the ball. And they're very in size from what I, I mean, you look at it, they all look the same.

• 11:04Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 11:05Speaker 02

  But they're in little patterns of triangles and big ones and small ones and different depth.

• 11:09Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 11:09Speaker 02

  Dimples.

• 11:09Speaker 01

  Some of the balls have really big. Different sizes even on the same ball.

• 11:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:13Speaker 02

  Yeah. So they have different sizes in diameter and different sizes in depth.

• 11:18Speaker 00

  The guys have been thinking. The guys have been thinking.

• 11:21Speaker 01

  And like you said.

• 11:22Speaker 02

  A lot of research.

• 11:23Speaker 01

  That probably only makes a difference to somebody who is on a level of play.

• 11:27Speaker 02

  You know, they're unbelievable. I have to say, I mean, anyone who's played golf would understand that a ball can curve to the left and be a hook or curve to the right. And be a slice for a right hander. The dimple patterns they're managing to create these days actually self correct that a little bit.

• 11:41Speaker 01

  So the ball's going straight.

• 11:42Speaker 02

  Ball will be hooking into the left trees and it won't actually go back the other way, but it will stop curving and start going straight.

• 11:48Speaker 00

  I know what the guys are like when it comes to when you redesign a ball and make it do certain things as you've just described. The top end players, I'm going to include you in that, Jeff. You're happy about that. You'll start to think, how can I use that to my advantage? Cause if it's a self correcting ball, I know I can do something with that for my advantage. Have the guys worked that out yet?

• 12:07Speaker 02

  Definitely. I mean, well.

• 12:08Speaker 01

  He's trying to be like bend it like Beckham, you know, he's got a little soccer background in this man right here.

• 12:14Speaker 00

  I know that's the way you'd be thinking.

• 12:15Speaker 02

  For sure. I mean, it's a, for those of us who grew up with the older stuff.

• 12:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:19Speaker 02

  The evolution of golf equipment was pretty linear, if you like.

• 12:23Speaker 01

  You had to go there in my day.

• 12:26Speaker 01

  I remember.

• 12:28Speaker 02

  This gray hair measures all that.

• 12:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, for sure.

• 12:31Speaker 01

  Back in my day.

• 12:32Speaker 02

  The, the evolution of golf equipment was a fairly linear improvement until mid eighties and a guy called Carsten Solheim, who started the pin company.

• 12:41Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 12:41Speaker 02

  Who actually I think was a rocket scientist of some.

• 12:44Speaker 01

  Oh, okay.

• 12:45Speaker 02

  He completely changed the guy. He showed us the technology. He moved the weight outside on irons and he was more of a golf club guy, but he took a massive step forward. And since then, it's been changing. So those of us who grew up with a ball that continued to curve, we're still kind of retraining our instincts to trust that it won't curve as much as it used to.

• 13:05Speaker 00

  Intuitive.

• 13:06Speaker 01

  And so then you would adjust your shot accordingly, right? Or leave your shot the same accordingly, depending upon what you know the ball will do.

• 13:14Speaker 02

  Well, you just hopefully you gradually adjust to. How far your new ball is going, how much the wind, because the crosswind

• 13:22Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 13:22Speaker 02

  is quite important for us and the modern ball gets hit a lot less by a crosswind.

• 13:26Speaker 00

  Gotcha.

• 13:27Speaker 02

  Which I assume is a

• 13:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You mean influence less?

• 13:29Speaker 02

  Influence, yes, to use the right terminology.

• 13:31Speaker 00

  There you go.

• 13:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You hit the ball, it influences it, yeah.

• 13:33Speaker 02

  It influences it, yeah. So it does a lot less than it used to.

• 13:36Speaker 00

  Okay. You talk about club development and we did a show recently, Chuck and I, with tennis rackets.

• 13:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:41Speaker 00

  And again, and they made, uh, I think it was Prince came out with the, back in the eighties again, the larger head, which made it a larger sweet spot.

• 13:51Speaker 02

  Right.

• 13:52Speaker 00

  Are they able to do that on a golf club to get a larger sweet spot? Because you talked about it just before about you've got to find it on the sweet spot all the time to get the strike that you want.

• 14:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, they have. I mean, I guess traditionally golf clubs were just really simple, small.

• 14:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:07Speaker 02

  Um, and before they really did any of this, this kind of launch, this, this kind of high speed camera, scientific research of impact and kind of what happens at impact with the ball.

• 14:19Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 14:20Speaker 02

  Um, they were really small and you had a, you had a sweet spot, maybe the size of a nickel, maybe.

• 14:25Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 14:25Speaker 02

  Where the, it would go optimally.

• 14:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:29Speaker 02

  Optimally, is that all right?

• 14:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, optimally, yeah. Is it Aussie nickel or an American nickel?

• 14:33Speaker 02

  We have a five cent piece.

• 14:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 14:35Speaker 00

  But would you know, because when, when we talk to baseball players and we talk to the tennis players, they say the same thing. You know, the second you've hit it through the vibration or lack of and by your ear. Do you have the same feeling?

• 14:48Speaker 02

  Both, yeah. You can tell instantly if you've got it right or wrong. I mean, it's the same with a lot of stuff, right? But, uh, we get pretty tuned to that.

• 14:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I, there's a, there's a friend of mine, a trainer actually, who plays baseball. And he said, when you hit the ball in the right spot and the right thing, there is no vibration.

• 15:03Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 15:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the ball goes 400 feet and he says, and he paused, he said, It's better than sex.

• 15:13Speaker 00

  What does it add? JP Allen Sibio, who was a baseball hitter and is a catcher for the Blue Jays.

• 15:18Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 15:18Speaker 00

  He said, oh no, it was Jeff Blum from the Houston Astros. He said, it was like a handful of bees. If he hit.

• 15:24Speaker 01

  If you hit the wrong way.

• 15:25Speaker 00

  If you hit it wrong, it was like a handful.

• 15:26Speaker 01

  Holding a hornet's nest.

• 15:27Speaker 00

  Shoots up your arms and everything.

• 15:29Speaker 01

  Why don't we get into like, uh, shot tracking?

• 15:32Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 15:32Speaker 01

  Because I.

• 15:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, but before you do that.

• 15:33Speaker 01

  Go ahead. Yes.

• 15:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Before you do that, this idea that the ball cannot curve in the way you thought it would. I'm, I'm just imagining a future where it's nothing but a game of trick shots like in billiards. If you keep going with the ball, the ball might, you know, just.

• 15:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, the trees over here. Let me just curve it around the tree. But, you know, do a, put some English on it to the left and do a three cushion back shot.

• 15:54Speaker 00

  So many things. Keep putting English on it. It doesn't sound like I'm doing the right thing. That just means curve. They say that to me and I'm like, what's going on?

• 16:03Speaker 01

  So the, I, I know you guys are, uh, tracking, uh, shots, uh, using several different technologies, but Doppler is one of them. What are they doing with Doppler in the, in the P, in the PGA?

• 16:14Speaker 02

  Uh, well, when we first started, when they started really chasing the R and D and the golf club and the golf ball, they started working out they needed to take all the data from impact, from the speed of the club, where it hits the whole thing. So they started taking photos of impact. And then they thought, well, it'd be much better if we actually, after the photo, knew what the ball did in relation to what happened to the ball with that photo. So they.

• 16:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:39Speaker 02

  They created a little thing, a Doppler radar at the back of the ball, um, that you put kind of behind where you're hitting shot. And you just hit shots and it measures club speed, club path, ball speed, ball flight. It follows the whole flight of the ball until it finishes.

• 16:54Speaker 00

  It started with 3D analytics, the whole, with the swing and then the, the speed of impact.

• 17:01Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 17:01Speaker 00

  So as you teach a golfer, not just to swing, but to swing, but to get maximum speed at the point of impact, not halfway through.

• 17:08Speaker 02

  And this, these, uh. Doppler kind of ball trackers help you do that naturally because you you put your iPad or your phone with the app open kind of down right in front of your pile of balls or next to your bag and every shot you hit it's instant feedback. It's spin rate, how far it went, where it went.

• 17:26Speaker 01

  Spin rate.

• 17:27Speaker 02

  Spin rate of the ball.

• 17:28Speaker 01

  Spin rate of the ball. Holy crap.

• 17:30Speaker 02

  Both backspin and any sort of. And you'll know, need to know that.

• 17:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, so that, so that means it is measuring not only in the center part of the ball, which will give you the ball's speed, but other, the above the halfway point and below the halfway point. So you get a rotation rate. So this is a very precise Doppler measurement.

• 17:48Speaker 02

  I, I, from what I understand, it's very precise. I mean, you would understand how they get to where they.

• 17:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, the point is if the ball's spinning, then the part, the part that's spinning across your view, which is the nearest part of the ball to you, is neither coming towards you nor away from you. Cause it used to be coming towards you. Now it's going away from you. So in that moment is doing neither. You have to measure it there to get the actual pure speed of the ball. Otherwise, if you measure it, the speed of the ball in either other spot, you're going to have less or more because the ball's spinning. Right? So but now, now you, now you want to do that on purpose to get the actual spin rate of the ball. So this is, this is more than what I was even imagining that you guys are up to.

• 18:24Speaker 01

  Well, they use, I know they use lasers. So what is the difference, Neil, you between like tracking something with lasers and what is regular Doppler?

• 18:33Speaker 02

  Okay. Well, he can answer the Doppler, but the Doppler is a radar that follows the ball. It tracks exactly what the ball does and does that. The lasers that we use on tour are, they kind of have three of them. They create all these triangles so they can get the data from where our balls go after every shot. So we finish our round, we see that we hit it 275 yards on the first and then hit it to 20 feet with a five on and then we hold a 20 foot putt and then we went to the next. And you compile data like this. Every round we play on tour is measured. Every single shot we hit, where it went on the course, how far it went, how far it was from our target, the whole thing. And we get. Years worth of data because of the laser measurements.

• 19:11Speaker 01

  Science!

• 19:13Speaker 00

  He's pushing all these buttons now. That's a happy face, by the way.

• 19:18Speaker 01

  Science! All right, so before we take a break, maybe you can break down just Doppler.

• 19:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah, we can. We've spent a minute on that. People know the word, but I don't think they always feel it.

• 19:27Speaker 01

  And really, it's just like, you know, you hear a Doppler and you're like, there must be a hurricane or a storm coming.

• 19:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, something's in motion.

• 19:32Speaker 01

  Something's in motion, is it? But what is Doppler?

• 19:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There was a German fellow named Christian Doppler, who suspected that sound changed depending on whether an object was moving towards you or away from you. And he did experiments with trains. This is in the 19th century. And a train whistle comes towards you, he noticed that the pitch was higher than that very same train whistle as it receded from you. So in the modern version of that, we think of cars. If you're standing adjacent to a freeway and a car's coming towards you, it goes "Mmmmm."

• 20:05Speaker 01

  And in New York, you hear "F you!" right afterwards.

• 20:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, there's no Doppler at all because nobody's moving in any traffic. We're in LA on the 405. Leave the Doppler at home. So we know about this frequency change. And so it turns out it is an exact relationship between how much the frequency changes and the speed of the thing coming towards you or moving away. It's an exact, it's a clean, it's a clean algebra 101 formula.

• 20:33Speaker 01

  Clean ratio.

• 20:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right. So if it's going twice as fast, it has twice the pitch coming towards you, the frequency of the pitch. So, so now, once you have something that can reflect that signal back to you, you have to choose the kind of light that would do that. Not all things will reflect a signal back to you in that way. So, by the way, it works with any wave. So it'll work with the sound waves on the train and it works with the light waves. And in this case, it would be microwaves or if you had some other kind of laser, optical laser, it would work for any kind of light. Light travels in waves. But you need to know the speed of that wave in order to do this calculation. And in our case, it's the speed of light in air, which is slightly less than the speed of light.

• 21:10Speaker 01

  In a vacuum.

• 21:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a simple formula. Now, you got machines. You plug it into the coding of the machine and now he can sit there and not have to even know what the formula looks like and his iPad is telling him as he stands there on the green.

• 21:24Speaker 00

  Okay, that was your Doppler Minute brought to you by Dr Neil deGrasse Tyson. And you may have had a bit of a bonus on that minute, but there you go. We'll take a break. Jeff Ogilvy, pleasure, absolute pleasure.

• 21:36Speaker 02

  Thanks for joining us.

• 21:37Speaker 01

  I hope we can get you back, man. You are really cool to talk to.

• 21:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was fun.

• 21:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just a quick thing, the putting green, that's actually real grass?

• 21:44Speaker 02

  Real grass.

• 21:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because I've never seen grass that looks like putting green grass.

• 21:47Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 21:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You guys must genetically engineer that stuff.

• 21:51Speaker 02

  Well, believe it or not, we do. I think maybe we should come back and talk about it.

• 21:54Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 21:55Speaker 00

  You're on, absolutely on. We'll get a greenskeeper in. We're going to take that break. The good doctor will be with us and Chuck will have thoughts on balls when we get back.

• 22:02Speaker 01

  You know it.

• 22:06Speaker 00

  Welcome back to Playing with Science. This, of course, is our look at golf. We've had to lose the services of Jeff Ogilvy. Apparently he's got to practise. They're going to be world number four and have to practise. You've already nailed it, dude. Anyway, right. The good doctor Neil deGrasse Tyson's still with us.

• 22:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, you know, I've never actually played golf, so I'm happy to help out where the physics applies, but you can't come to me for expertise here in the golf. So here's how much I don't play golf. You ready? People ask me, am I an atheist? And I said, I'm really, so if you look at it, I'm closer to an agnostic, but I don't even like the word atheist because it's a word that describes what you're not. And why should there be a word to describe what you're not? And my example there has been, there's no word for me as someone who does not play golf. Are there words for non-golfers? Yeah, it's called black.

• 23:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Plus Tiger didn't say he was black. He was some other thing.

• 23:15Speaker 01

  Cobble nation.

• 23:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cobble, whatever. Right, right, right. Thai, whatever. Thai cocktails is what that was. So golf was always my go-to reference for the statement that there are no words that says you don't play golf.

• 23:29Speaker 01

  That's, that's actually really cool.

• 23:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 23:31Speaker 01

  I like the...

• 23:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, I don't want words describing... What I don't do. Right. Give me words to describe. What I am. What I do. And what I do. Yeah.

• 23:38Speaker 00

  Let's get to one of your tweets.

• 23:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  About golf.

• 23:42Speaker 00

  About golf.

• 23:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't remember tweeting about golf. How deep, how deep are you digging here in the, in the Twitter archives?

• 23:48Speaker 00

  Well, let's just, let's just say we've been down the mine and we've come up with golfers.

• 23:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, when, when was this? That's April two thousand thirteen. Oh, okay. This is early, uh, yeah, this is.

• 24:01Speaker 00

  Okay, April two thousand thirteen.

• 24:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tweet.

• 24:04Speaker 00

  Early Tyson tweet. Golfers want silence when hitting stationary balls at their feet. Baseball batters in screaming crowds hit ninety mile an hour fastballs. Discuss.

• 24:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was just an observation, you know, I wasn't.

• 24:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, but no, I, obviously the psychology, the, the, the sort of hitting of a ball in the mind and being able to, well, I can't do it because everyone's talking.

• 24:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, I, I think it's, I think it's just tradition in the sport. I don't see any actual reason why a golfer shouldn't be able to concentrate regardless of noise level. If you speak to basketball players in the final seconds who have to hit a free throw and crowds are screaming and the crowd behind the backboard.

• 24:52Speaker 00

  Is waving things.

• 24:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Waving things that are specifically designed to distract it. If you ask those players, they say everything gets zoned out. Right. And it's just me, the ball and the basket. Nice. And we have the power to do this. It's, it's, you know, selective attention directing. And I use that with my children all the time. We're very good at that. I'm so good at that. It's attenuating for, uh, uh, things that would otherwise distract your attention.

• 25:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so, so in golf, they have no tradition of doing that. Right. And therefore they have no such ability to pull that off unless we slowly sort of ease it in.

• 25:29Speaker 00

  Is golf unique in the sense that if it's a, if it's a tennis match, you've got an opponent? Uh, if it's a baseball batter, you pitch a hitter. Golfer, it's you, a ball, a stick, a hole. And there's no one else involved. It's all about you.

• 25:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So there aren't other sports like that, like, like in, in, uh, in, in the moment.

• 25:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's the field events of track and field. It's just really just you. There's not someone directly against you.

• 25:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. Singular sports, singular performance sports.

• 25:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 25:57Speaker 01

  But track and field, like you said, also screaming, lights of, you know, yeah, cheering on.

• 26:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 26:03Speaker 01

  Uh, and, uh, the funny thing is that, uh, like in football playoffs, the coaches actually pipe in crowd noise if you're in the away team. So you're practicing at home and they turn the stadium speakers up as loud as they can go.

• 26:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To distract them.

• 26:23Speaker 01

  To distract the players during practice in hopes that their mind will, uh, become acclimated to the distraction and it will no longer be a distraction.

• 26:32Speaker 00

  It's weird if you're playing and there's nobody there or like there's no, uh, didn't the NBA do some, a couple of games earlier in the year?

• 26:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah. With, with no crowd.

• 26:41Speaker 00

  With no, with no music, no background music.

• 26:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, I thought, no, there was no, there was an empty stadium.

• 26:46Speaker 01

  NFL, and it was an NFL game because of, was it a storm or what was it? I can't remember.

• 26:50Speaker 00

  No, the NBA played games without any music. It's sort of da, da, da. None of that happened.

• 26:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 26:56Speaker 01

  For the entire game?

• 26:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:57Speaker 01

  And did it have an effect on the players?

• 26:59Speaker 00

  No, it freaked me out. Watching that was weird.

• 27:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He needs the music.

• 27:03Speaker 01

  That is great.

• 27:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But, but, but in tennis, another game where silence is tradition, you know, is a tradition. We always hear, quiet, please.

• 27:11Speaker 01

  Quiet, please.

• 27:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Quiet, please.

• 27:13Speaker 01

  And I'm just like, who are you telling me to be quiet? No, not the boss of me. And then security gets involved. It's just awful.

• 27:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. So, so I think it's just tradition, but it's fun to sort of make fun of that difference. That's all. It was a playful tool.

• 27:24Speaker 00

  No, no, I, I get it, but it does, it, but it does, it sparks a debate.

• 27:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The 90 mile an hour fastball is thrown with the full intent of you not hitting it.

• 27:32Speaker 01

  Right.

• 27:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not only in speed, but in movement.

• 27:34Speaker 01

  In movement.

• 27:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah. So.

• 27:35Speaker 00

  It is apparently the hardest thing.

• 27:39Speaker 00

  To.

• 27:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do in sports.

• 27:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, in elite sports.

• 27:41Speaker 01

  And now, you know, I was thinking about that.

• 27:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But that's a quantifiable statement.

• 27:44Speaker 01

  I was about to say.

• 27:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know this.

• 27:45Speaker 01

  Two things. One, you just sparked in me when you were talking about tennis. Golf and tennis, both country club sports.

• 27:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 27:55Speaker 01

  And so therefore.

• 27:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exclusive membership sports.

• 27:58Speaker 01

  Membership sports. And so I'm sure traditionally it was played in pretty much silence. So when it becomes competitive, they continue that tradition because that's how the game is played.

• 28:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Even though now there's a thousands of people.

• 28:10Speaker 01

  Even now, there's thousands of people as a spectator.

• 28:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Along as spectators along the green.

• 28:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, you play you play in front of grandstands.

• 28:16Speaker 01

  Right.

• 28:16Speaker 00

  On a golf course, on the big majors. So, yeah, they've they're they're saying, quiet, please, whilst selling tickets in the tens of thousands.

• 28:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, that's funny.

• 28:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The reason why hitting a baseball, we know, is the hardest thing to do in sports is because the best hitters successfully put the ball where it's not fielded.

• 28:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 28:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Only a third of the time.

• 28:38Speaker 01

  Right.

• 28:38Speaker 00

  So if I come out with a point three average, I'm a superstar.

• 28:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Correct. You're in you are in you are you are in the Hall of Fame and people write whole articles about you.

• 28:48Speaker 00

  I like this.

• 28:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whereas I don't there's not clear that there's any other sport where if you had a a sixty seven percent failure rate, that you would be considered a success.

• 28:56Speaker 01

  So now, check this out. Now that you say that, golf, we say the hardest thing to do is hit a baseball, a nine mile fastball, but how about a hole in one? So if you're on a par three course, that means that you can get a hole in one.

• 29:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's possible.

• 29:11Speaker 01

  That is a possible shot.

• 29:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, the ball's not so far away that it's not in your in out of reach.

• 29:15Speaker 01

  Right. Which means you can get on the green and run, which means if you place the ball on the green in one properly, you could get a roll to get a hole in one.

• 29:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh huh.

• 29:23Speaker 01

  So how often does a hole in one happen in golf? And maybe that's the hardest thing to do.

• 29:27Speaker 00

  It happens. No, it happens a lot more than.

• 29:30Speaker 01

  Than than a home run?

• 29:32Speaker 00

  Maybe not a home run, but it does happen, yeah.

• 29:35Speaker 01

  But they say the hardest thing to do in sports is to hit a home run.

• 29:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, no, no.

• 29:41Speaker 00

  No, it's the fastball, isn't it?

• 29:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, the hardest thing to do in sports is to pitch a perfect game. So let's just get that straight.

• 29:46Speaker 01

  Oh, really?

• 29:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. What fraction of all games are perfect games? If that's what you're talking about.

• 29:51Speaker 01

  That's what I'm talking about.

• 29:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That is like the mini school near zero fraction.

• 29:54Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 29:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so, uh, uh, so you are right. A hole in one is rarer for a golfer than a home run is for a batter. For any kind of slugger. Right, right, right. So I'll give you that.

• 30:06Speaker 01

  All right.

• 30:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A hole in one is going to be rarer.

• 30:08Speaker 01

  Well, if you're giving it, I'm taking it.

• 30:12Speaker 00

  Do you advocate noise whilst putting to close out a major? You're in Augusta. You've got, you've got a six foot putt. That's you banking seven, possibly eight figures in your bank. And you, you lot, shut up. I'm at work here. This is worth a lot of money.

• 30:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I sometimes fantasize, like if I'm trying to solve some grand equation, that there's.

• 30:34Speaker 00

  You fantasize about equations. You fantasize about equations.

• 30:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's up with the commentator, right?

• 30:41Speaker 01

  He could go all the way.

• 30:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's, he's got three lines left, we think. And he's there. He's almost there. Da da da da, Q E D. He's done it. And then there's a, so it's just kind of. Who was it? There was a classical music comedian. Uh, was it Victor Borga?

• 30:59Speaker 00

  Victor Borga. It could well be. Yeah, yeah, the pianist, yeah.

• 31:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, he's the one who had a concert where there were announcers describing the classical music performance the way sportscasters. So, so they say, and they're like eating during the thing. They say, you know, this tuba player, they traded him for the other guy for this. And then there's a trumpet that.

• 31:20Speaker 01

  You know, the Philly Pops brought in this oboe player. That's funny.

• 31:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And one of them, and a trumpet hits a wrong note.

• 31:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, that's his third mess up this year. We probably won't see him in the next performance. You know, it was, it was hilarious.

• 31:33Speaker 01

  That's a brilliant pit.

• 31:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Brilliant pit.

• 31:35Speaker 01

  It's pretty cool, man. Oh, man, we are out of time, guys.

• 31:38Speaker 00

  We are. We have learned one thing. Neil fantasizes about equations.

• 31:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, one of more than one thing I fantasize about.

• 31:45Speaker 00

  That's different to me, but there we are.

• 31:47Speaker 01

  I've learned something. I want golf to change so that people can actually heckle people while they're putting. That would be awesome.

• 31:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You suck, McElroy, and your wife is sleeping with your brother.

• 31:58Speaker 01

  Like, that would be amazing. I'm sorry, that's how I heckle.

• 32:02Speaker 00

  Oh, okay.

• 32:03Speaker 01

  I probably went too far. Okay.

• 32:05Speaker 00

  May have done. Right, that's it for Playing with Science. Hope you've enjoyed it and, uh, thank you.

• 32:10Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 32:10Speaker 00

  To Neil deGrasse Tyson once again, and our new good friend.

• 32:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Always happy to help out.

• 32:15Speaker 00

  Jeff Ogilvy. So that's it. Hope you've enjoyed it and we look forward to your company soon.