Racquetology

At Big Think, Daniel Honan writes about how today's top tennis players may be "intuitive physicists."

That doesn't mean that they spend their time wondering about the spin of a charmed quark. Sometimes we get caught up in the wild and wacky world of the subatomic and we may forget that basic physics is about how objects move through space and how they respond to the forces that act on them. Tennis balls, of course, fit into the category of "objects" and tennis racquets wielded by skilled professionals fit into the category of "forces that act on them."

Honan also doesn't believe that the top players do all that much thinking about angular momentum or the coefficient of friction derived from the different playing surfaces. They don't have time, for one. Tennis players are roughly 80 feet apart and the serve may be coming at them at 125 miles an hour. They have less than a second to react and they are unlikely to spend that second formulating equations.

So, he says, they have an intuitive grasp of the physics of how the ball will behave when it comes off an opponent's racquet or off the ground. The top three players he mentions -- Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokevic -- have had success on the many different surfaces of tennis courts, which all react differently and require differences in playing styles. This varied success stems from their ability to change their style of play to match the surface.

John McEnroe, of course, generally had only one reaction when the ball bounced up from the surface.