Billiards Essay

The game Billiards, sometimes referred to in bars as pool, is entirely based upon physics principles. Billiards is played on a table lined with felt, the table has 6 pocket holes in which the balls are meant to be knocked in, and players hit the balls with a cue stick. Different variations of billiards games exist, the most popular being eight-ball, in which one player attempts to knock all solid balls in while the other player knocks in the striped balls; and nine-ball, in which players knock in balls in numerical order with the number 9 ball being the last.
Billiards uses some of the most fundamental principles found in physics. The game uses all three of Newton’s laws and the associated ideas of collisions, momentum, energy, forces, and friction. There are two fundamental laws used in this game that are very important.
First, the law of …show more content…
This happens when the cue ball is hit towards a set rack of a triangle of 15 colored balls, solid or striped, in eight-ball or a diamond of 9 numbered balls in nine-ball. The break causes all of the balls to start moving in different directions at different speeds. To get the most out of breaking, the player should strike the cue ball at a certain angle with such a force at a distance away from the rack. Usually the cue ball is placed at the “head spot” at one end of the table and the rack is placed with the first ball touching the “foot spot” on the other end. As show in the figure above, each of the spots is located a fourth of the length from the end of the table, and the standard pool table is 4’x 8’ (1.22m x 2.44m). So the distance from head spot to foot spot, or the distance that the cue ball must travel to break the balls, is 1.22m. The force of the strike from the pool cue must be great enough to send the ball this