Putting through Phase Space: Thinking like a scientist in everyday life

Extra note: I'm starting a Facebook page for AlphaPhoenix with video updates and info about projects I'm working on!

In this video I take a trip to Thistle Dhu, the famous putting course at Pinehurst and write a matlab program to simulate a million putts at once, all in an effort to map "Phase Spaces" of golf. There's a common scientific mindset normally referred to as a phase space or parameter space, where you express everything that could happen in an experiment in terms of the variables you can control. In the case of putting a golf ball, the ball can go in the hole, or it can miss completely - if it misses, we also care how far from the hole it stopped. You only actually have control of two variables while putting a golf ball, the initial speed and initial direction. After you hit the ball, physics takes over!


Music:
I Dunno by grapes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (


Graphic based on plot from McSkimming et al., (2014) 10.1016/j.jcrysgro.2013.10.013

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