{"id":285,"date":"2025-03-21T06:34:47","date_gmt":"2025-03-21T06:34:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/2025\/03\/21\/sally-rooney-on-snooker-and-the-mystery-of-athletic-genius\/"},"modified":"2025-03-21T06:34:47","modified_gmt":"2025-03-21T06:34:47","slug":"sally-rooney-on-snooker-and-the-mystery-of-athletic-genius","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/2025\/03\/21\/sally-rooney-on-snooker-and-the-mystery-of-athletic-genius\/","title":{"rendered":"Sally Rooney on Snooker and the Mystery of Athletic Genius"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>In that particular frame, after potting that last red, how did O\u2019Sullivan know that the cue ball would come back down the table that way and land precisely where he wanted it? Of course it was only obeying the laws of physics. But if you wanted to calculate the trajectory of a cue ball coming off an object ball and then a cushion using Newtonian physics, you\u2019d need an accurate measurement of every variable, some pretty complex differential equations, and a lot of calculating time. O\u2019Sullivan lines up that shot and plays it in the space of about six seconds. A lucky guess? It would be lucky to make a guess like that once in a lifetime. He\u2019s been doing this sort of thing for thirty years.<\/p>\n<p>What then? If he\u2019s not calculating, and he\u2019s not guessing, what is Ronnie O\u2019Sullivan doing? Why does the question seem so strange? And why doesn\u2019t anybody know the answer?<br \/>\n\u2014 Read on <a href=\"https:\/\/kottke.org\/25\/03\/sally-rooney-on-snooker-and-the-mystery-of-athletic-genius\">kottke.org\/25\/03\/sally-rooney-on-snooker-and-the-mystery-of-athletic-genius<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In that particular frame, after potting that last red, how did O\u2019Sullivan know that the cue ball would come back down the table that way and land precisely where he wanted it? Of course it was only obeying the laws of physics. But if you wanted to calculate the trajectory of a cue ball coming [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-285","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/285","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=285"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/285\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=285"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=285"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=285"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}