Who is the surfing scientist

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I drove the entire Pacific coast of Mexico a few summers ago. I read a lot of philosophy during high school, then realized words were always going to fail.

Meditation brought me some amount of inner peace, but physics and math allowed me to tackle the puzzle of reality intellectually. And, the more I learn, the more beautiful it is. It draws me in. I am a complete mystery to my parents. I care more about enjoying life and figuring things out. I want the deep pleasures in life. I want to understand what others have thought about life, and put the pieces together into a picture that makes sense.

I want to paddle as hard as I can, drop into the pit, crank a bottom turn, and pull in under the lip as it throws out — and hoot like a madman after the ride.

I want to figure out the pattern at the heart of the universe. And I want to lay twenty consecutive, fully laid out turns down a groomed black diamond on a carving board.

I try to live my daydreams. The Surfing Scientist. Here's a brief biography to fill in the details Despite being as 'Aussie as', Ruben was actually born in Holland. Weird Surfing Scientist trivia His favourite surfboard - a 6ft 5inch with a square tail but now he rides a 7ft mini-malibu more than a short board because you can sit further out, annoy the short-boarders and body-boarders and get more waves.

Contact the Surfing Scientist To get in touch with Ruben, or to book a school tour, go to rubenmeerman. Who is the Surfing Scientist? Ruben's on Twitter Tweets by surfnscientist. Historian Peter Westwick and his colleague Peter Neushul thought up their scientific history of surfing, The World in the Curl Crown, , on boards off the coast of California.

As the winter surfing season gets into full swing, Westwick talks about warfare, wetsuits, climate change and forecasting surf. Surfing is often seen as a romantic retreat to the wild ocean among seals and dolphins — finding yourself no longer at the apex of the food chain. But in The World in the Curl , I and my co-author and fellow historian, Peter Neushul, are trying to show that surfing is caught up with industry, technology and commerce.

In the morning I check conditions on my laptop, then paddle out in a neoprene wetsuit on an ultralight board. The technology connects us to nature but also changes our relationship with it. The popularization of surfing over the past century is linked to the evolution of surfboard design. Early surfers in Hawaii used giant redwood planks. To drag a kilogram chunk of wood across the beach, then wrestle it through walls of white water, you had to be a phenomenal athlete.

These days you can get a 2. There was early experimentation with balsa wood, which is light until it absorbs water and sinks. In , surfer Tom Blake devised a hollow wooden surfboard that was probably inspired by the wing of the Lockheed Vega aeroplane. But the real revolution came from synthetic materials made during wartime.

Studying mechanical engineering at the California Institute of Technology [Caltech] in the early s, Robert Simmons ran across polystyrene foam and polyester resin, then mass-produced for aviation. With his knowledge of water flow, connected to Caltech's work on air-dropped torpedoes, he designed streamlined boards. His 'hydrodynamic planing hull' soon became the standard. In the s, aerospace engineer Tom Morey, who had worked on rocket nozzles, invented the boogie board, a simple foam panel that got millions of people riding waves.

A recent backlash against new materials has seen some surfers return to solid wooden boards that promise an unmediated encounter with the wave. During the Second World War, Allied divers who defused underwater mines wore drysuits for warmth, but air trapped inside the suits caused them to wrinkle and pinch.