A UNBC Physics Professor claims to have cracked the science behind curling.
Dr. Mark Shegelski studied the sport and found that friction on the back of the rock causes it to turn clockwise, creating a small layer of water on the back of the rock.
“So it rotates clockwise, the back is moving to the left, so the friction is to the right, it makes the rock curl to the right,” he says.
Shegelski says the Golf and Curling Club “Went all out” to help with his experiments.
“First, we did a whole bunch of different kind of shots on flooded ice like the normal draw shot, where you just rotate two or three times,” he says. “To the oppose extreme where we have a rock rotating really fast and moving a shot distance.”
The question is “Knowing this, does it mean curlers are inherently good at physics?”
Well, Shegelski says this is actually “Science in disguise”.
“They don’t realize that they are doing physics, but they actually are,” he says. “But things like, the details we go into in our scientific papers, stuff like that, that’s not something a person needs to know to curl well.
Shegelski says one his members cracked the mystery behind the science to help them explain everything behind the physics of curling.
Shegelski feels his research also debunks a theory that the stone curls because of asymmetrical friction created by tiny microscopic scratches on the pebbled ice.
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