My bit about surface tension caused me to mention physics conservation laws. (In the title of this blog, kindly append an "s" to the word "Law".) I want now to say more on that subject. It will also, remarkably, be an opportunity for me to wax poetic about the joys of Julian's, the NYC pool hall at which the movie "The Huster" SHOULD have been shot.

While I was at NYU my best friend was a guy named Karl Erb. Karl's father was an aeronautical engineer who had designed the nose gear of the YB-47 flying wing prototype. That impressed the heck out of me though it meant nothing to Karl, who had a less than zero interest in aviation. No, Karl was interested only in physics ...

... And in the game of pool, pocket billiards to you UK/continent people, which he taught me to play in the NYU student center. I didn't play all that well -- typical runs of 5-6 balls, but Karl wasn't bad, on the order of 10 balls per run. Nevertheless, one thing led to another and I ended up having a pool cue custom-made for me at a shop down on Radio Row, later to be the site of the Twin Towers. It was a standard unscrews-in-the-middle top-of-the-line cue but I had them add weights and position them till it was just the way I wanted -- heavier than most players are comfortable with by about four ounces, but so perfectly balanced that I could shoot with my right thumb and index finger closed into an O so I would be able not to grip the cue the way so many players do. The added weights gave the cue a lot of momentum, helping me with straight follow-through, which was one of my weak points.

Karl and I played straight pool. No eightball. No nineball. Just as we each preferred straight poker, another story for another day. But as conservative as we were about pool, we were thrilled the day the legendary Willy Mosconi came to the student center to put on an exhibition.

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Mosconi did his incredible trick shot show, a small portion of which you see in The Hustler, passed off as normal pool playing. Well, it's not. Hardly anybody can do a masse (pr. "mass-ay") shot the way Mosconi could, making the cue ball leap over an object ball and then come back toward the shooter, knocking the object ball into the pocket in front of which the shooter is standing. No, when most people tried something like that they would simply tear the billiard cloth. As a result, essentially every pool hall that plans to make a profit forbids masse shots.

Sometimes, as part of his exhibition, Mosconi would play an entire game by himself, against the clock. That is, he would break and then run rack after rack till he had reached 125 balls. Sometimes he would miss, and maybe most of the time he would miss a single shot, or perhaps two, but to a first approximation Mosconi was one of a small number -- a very small number -- of players who could do that.

Mosconi was so good that his face was known to all pool players, and he would no longer be able to get a game for money, not that he needed it. He made a very good living traveling around the USA putting on his exhibitions.

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Our show took place early in the afternoon. Everybody who cared at all about pool, about 25-30 of us, cut all our classes and attended. Karl and I, and everybody else, watched in awe as Mosconi did his thing. Then, at the point in the show where he would normally wrap the exhibition by putting on his run-nine-racks-AQAP demo, he did something very unusual. He offered to play the best player in the house provided that he, Mosconi, would be allowed to break.

He didn't say so but most likely he was thinking along the lines of "My opponent will miss at some point. When he does I'll run 125 balls and that will be the end of him."

So Mosconi broke ... And his opponent began to shoot. Mosconi probably didn't know it but the opposition was the New York State collegiate straight pool champion. I don't remember his name so let's just call him Dave. Dave did something very unusual for him -- he missed his third or so shot. This must have gotten Mosconi's sympathy because a rack or two later Mosconi missed a shot that clearly he could have made while asleep on his feet. He probably thought he was making it a fair and interesting game. However ...

Dave proceeded to run the table. And then he ran another rack. And another. And another. And when he reached 125, the game was over and Dave had defeated the great Willy Mosconi in a fair fight. Mosconi, ever the gentleman, complimented Dave on his excellent shot-making skills, and most especially Dave's skill in leaving himself in good position to shoot the next ball. You see, an experienced player will size up the table after the break and in a matter of ten or twenty seconds will forumulate a plan for running the table. He will know which ball he will sink first, leaving him in position to sink the second ball, and so on.

This was what was so remarkable about Mosconi's run-125-balls demonstration. Somebody would rack the balls for him, then he would break, and then he would simply start shooting -- he didn't need to evaluate the whole table, he would do that on the fly. He was such a good shotmaker that he would soon be in an optimal position to run the rest of the rack. During each rack he FLEW around the table, making a shot perhaps every five or so seconds. This meant that he would run a 15-ball rack in about a minute and a half. Allow a minute to get the next rack set up and he would be playing at the rate of 15 balls every 2-3 minutes, an astonishing accomplishment.

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Karl and I got married at roughly the same time, and we ended up living in the same apartment building on East 13th Street, right next door to what a few years later would become the world-famous Electric Circus discotheque, among the first clubs of its kind.

Just a couple of blocks from where we lived was Julian's Billiards on 14th Street. I don't recall the name of the pool hall where The Hustler was shot but it was at Broadway and 89th or thereabouts, an out-of-the-way location. They chose itfor theatrical purposes because, judging by the movie, it was small and clubby. (I never played there.)

In contrast, Julian's was the Big Time, known far and wide. When players from elsewhere in the country wanted to make their mark they came to Julian's. I suspect that the only reason The Huster wasn't made there is because Julian's was HUGE and would have made the characters seem insiginificant. Julian's had actual staggered rising bench seats from which onlookers could watch the action, like the bleachers at a baseball field, except here the stands were quite close to the first row of tables, like the seating in a teaching hospital classroom, though straight rather than curved. (I seem to recall three rows of tables in all, each containing about ten tables. As I said, HUGE.)

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Karl and I would often meet at Julian's after classes. Sometimes we would even cut classes to be there. Sometimes our wives would let us out for the evening so we could go there. Yet we didn't play there very often because it was embarassing for pikers like us to do so. No, we came to watch and to learn. If we played there at all it would be in the morning while all the real players were still asleep.

And what a treat it was to watch. Not only were there terrific players, ones who could have eaten Mosconi for breakfast, there were genuine movie-type characters ... Because people who play pool for a living, or for whom pool is the dominant factor in their lives, are just as colorful as chess players.

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But wait! you ask. What on earth does this stuff have to do with conservation laws in physics?