You'd have to boil the concept of minigolf down to the barest aspects and ask yourself how much each can change while still qualifying as minigolf. Can the "ball" be an electron? Can the "putter" and "hole" be electromagnetic fields?
this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2025
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Yes, when I say golf I mean the abstract concept of golf.
Tho, it also has to be silly I guess, we are talking minigolf.
Not OP, but I'd be more interested in making a tiny ball round enough to roll across a surface and fall into a hole (not the "absence of an electron" meaning of that word). And I'd want it achieved through gravitational forces rather than electromagnetic. I feel like that makes the problem harder and largely makes it a materials science question. Someone in MEMS research probably has a good idea of how to approach this.
With those parameters, the system would probably need to operate in a high vacuum with as little interaction from electromagnetic forces as possible. All materials used should probably have a low permittivity to reduce the amount of static charge buildup from friction. Intuitively, I feel like it makes sense to use the same material for everything. But it might not be that simple. Maybe the material used to make the smallest round ball isn't well suited to making the smoothest surface for a short putting green?
I dunno, I'm just a guy who took a few classes on semiconductor design in undergrad spit balling.
Ok I am am sort of big picture more interested in what philosophically is the miniest minigolf you can make with it still being golf with a "ball", a "club" and some minimal course that must be navigated to a "hole".
I am fascinated by your question as well though. I would imagine it might come down to manufacturing a ball from a non-crystal lattice like glass to get it as small as possible while still being a ball?
I feel like you could do this with some kind of stereolithography process like in semiconductor processing... You could very easily create the green, hole, and putter at astronomically tiny scales as microscopic thin slabs of silicon, but the roundness of the ball, I don't know enough about the specific processes to know how you might go about that. I'm sure it'd be possible with enough smart people thinking about it, though.
Actually interacting with this game, though? Are you imagining like Atomic force microscopy, a tiny tiny little putter attached to a much larger macroscopic assembly able to be manually manipulated?
Yeah, I mean I wanna putt somehow in someway, it is minigolf after all.
but the roundness of the ball, I don't know enough about the specific processes to know how you might go about that
Perhaps a single molecule of buckminsterfullerene would work?
https://www.sigmaaldrich.com/US/en/product/aldrich/483036
~$200 for 8.3e20 tiny golf balls? Pretty good deal if you ask me.
Any smaller and it would be called micro golf.
Nanogolf has entered the chat.
Make it smoother and it becomes golf-c.
Lies
So, the sport/game here is defined as having some moving element, which you're tasked with propelling through obstacles to some kind of capture point, which is the goal. Right?
I'm guessing the answer is a single electron in a series of semiconducting nanostructures at near-absolute zero, with a quantum dot as the hole. I'd assume there's some sort of way you could impart controlled momentum to the "ball" with a laser, and some way to measure where it is afterwards. Smaller than that, and we have pretty little control over what matter does.
Interference patterns as a strategic element could be kind of interesting. And, you'd have to relax any rules about waiting for the ball to stop, since by the uncertainty principle that can't happen.
The cooling reqiurement is a huge practical challenge - you'd need temps within a fraction of a degree of absolute zero to minimize thermal noise that would basically make your "ball" bounce around randomly like its constantly hitting invisible bumpers.
Yep. Hopefully the dilution refrigerators they use for quantum computers would work. Electrons are also easier than more substantial particles to keep still IIRC.
In hindsight, it's obvious that the "club" should be an electrostatic field modulated in the RF range, not a laser. We've been carefully knocking electrons around with fields since Faraday, after all. The hardest part would be to incorporate a grid of minimally-invasive single electron detectors. And maybe the more whimsical obstacles, if you really want an electron windmill.
We may be able to accomplish nano-golf, but I think we're a ways away from quantum-golf.
Sure, you could fire an electron at a target. I don't think we've isolated quarks to be able to do that yet.
You physically can't - if they're ever far away from another quark the strong force field becomes intense enough to excite a new quark into existence.
Electrons are also fundamental, though.