He became a BCA-certified instructor, co-wrote the BCA’s instructors’ training manual and, with two friends, formed the San Francisco Billiard Academy. When the Billiard Congress of America created a formal program to train instructors in 1991, Jewett, who’d been teaching since grad school, welcomed the effort. Jewett describes most instruction as “Old Joe over in the corner at your local pool hall, who could show you some shots if you’d pay for his time at the table.” Players aren’t born experts, and until the late 20th century, learning from pros was rare. Jewett’s skill in both the performance and analysis of billiards games blossomed alongside his graduate studies, and he began seeking the best way to teach cue sports to others. If calculated correctly (Coriolis analyzed the relevant geometries in 1835), the spinning cue ball will move away from the obstructing ball, abruptly turn course and stop just after nudging the object ball into the pocket. The player strikes from above, aiming the stick directly “through” the cue ball to an imaginary spot on the cloth. Unfortunately there’s another ball between them. Assume the object ball sits on the lip of the corner pocket, awaiting only a gentle tap from the cue ball a few inches away. Look impossible? If the player can send the cue ball spinning on its vertical axis to strike the rail immediately beside the target, it will jump sideways, bump the center of the object ball, and knock it straight down the rail into the pocket. Challenge: send the object ball at a right angle, into the corner. Say the target is a ball “frozen” to the end rail, hard against the cushion midway between corner pockets, with the cue ball at the other end of the table. Jewett has published numerous articles about shots that depend on spin, having mastered those shots himself. While simple shots are best, spin is inescapable. A squirtless stick would have no mass at all. Jewett’s personal cue stick is one of the first whose shaft is made of strong, light carbon fiber, greatly reducing squirt. The cue stick’s mass near the tip is decisive. Squirt results from conservation of momentum. Jewett and his associates, using slow-motion videos, found that as the cue ball starts its spin, the stick is pushed to the side its momentum is balanced by the equal and opposite momentum of the cue ball itself. To apply spin, a cue stick’s tip strikes the cue ball off center hit on one side, the ball travels toward the opposite side, at an often unpredictable angle that can cause a miss. Years later, he and a group of colleagues became the first to understand the physics of “squirt,” or cue-ball deflection. In the spirit of Coriolis, Jewett also pursued unexplained phenomena of billiards. “Coriolis figured out a lot of things that people are just now discovering, or haven’t discovered yet,” he says. In the book’s meticulous diagrams, Jewett saw that his sense of pool shots as physics experiments had borne fruit more than a century earlier. His Mathematical Theory of Effects in the Game of Billiards was also about spin: it detailed the behavior of spinning billiard balls. Published in 1835, it shows the speed of the cue ball when hit at various heights. It was in 1972 that Jewett came across a little-known book by the 19th-century French physicist Gaspard-Gustave Coriolis, best remembered for analyzing such effects as the opposite spins of hurricanes in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. Jewett built a distinguished career at HP and its descendants, Agilent Technologies and Keysight Technologies, was awarded five patents in the area of signal generation and analysis and retired in 2015.Įver since starting over as a Berkeley undergraduate, however, Jewett had been pursuing a parallel career.Ī diagram from Gaspard-Gustave Coriolis’s book. He developed expertise in new fields like data converters based on Josephson junctions, inspired by his studies in superconductivity. Bachelor’s degree in hand, he went to work for Hewlett-Packard.īefore long the company had him back at Berkeley, this time underwriting his graduate work. After completing his service, he returned to Berkeley and majored in electrical engineering. He was sent to school to learn electronics and later stationed in Vietnam, although, he says, “it wasn’t Full Metal Jacket.” Compared to combat zones, the base where he worked with radar weather equipment was a resort, complete with a pool hall, where he became an expert player. He spent so much time at the Student Union’s 17 billiards tables that he flunked out.īob Jewett (photo by Jim Block)Jewett then joined the U.S. When Jewett entered Berkeley as a math major, what began as synchronicity turned into conflict. Then a friend got a pool table for his birthday and invited him to play pool was love at first sight. ’79 EECS) was “one of those nerdy kids who was the lab assistant to the physics class,” he says. As a high school junior in the 1960s, Bob Jewett (B.S.
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