His entire run is pretty amazing, but the 1:20 shot is the one where I had to stop the video and watch it again to make sure I saw it correctly. Even the audience takes a couple seconds to process what happened.

The commentators, meanwhile, can't be bothered to react.

Yeah, what was up with that? The way he curved the cue ball into the middle of the cluster was nothing short of jaw-dropping, and they literally didn't comment on it.

Whaaaa?????

You guys are called "commentators". Do your damn jobs!

That makes me think maybe that kind of break isn't so rare

It's just a lot of english.

He did a really good job with it but it's a safe bet that anyone who would actually watch snooker doesn't needed it pointed out to them.

And a triple play is just throwing a ball, no need to remark on it.

There'd be no paradox.
You just cant know anything with 100% accuracy, as well as the inherent messiness and complicatedness of the real human scale world, when you get down to a quantum scale you come up against the uncertainty principle.
Also remember that the laws and math we have governing friction and so on are not *real*. They are only models that are useful to us in predicting certain limited things for a certain range of scenarios to a certain level of probability.

What Mr. P said. At your highest "resolution" for prediction, quantum uncertainty would take over, and outcomes would become more and more unpredictable at increasing levels of precision.

I think you'll find your answer in the documentary "The Color of Money."

As soon as you involve a stupid person everything goes to shit; and you cannot predict whether or not any individual will be stupid at any given time.

Sorry for being stupid here and not understanding the uncertainty principle:

If I was able to replicate the exact same physical properties for a particular snooker shot, does it mean that it would not produce the exact same result every time?

Please see Dr Malcolm's explanation in the documentary "Jurassic Park."

That only made me fall in love even more with Goldblum

@ Bisekrankas

No, not exactly. And we dont even need to bring uncertainty into this. The 2nd time you set up the balls, no matter how accurately, it will be a little different. The arrangement of heat in the molecules of the balls will not be identical. The planets in the solar system and the magma in the earth will have moved so theyre gravitational attraction on the balls will not be identical + innumerable subtle little things like that.

On the scale of whether a ball will go into a hole a few inches across those sorts of things dont really matter. I'm sure using modern precision engineering we could recreate the same basic shot over and over millions of times without a different ultimate result.

However if you wanted to re-create a sequence of shots, say 100's or 1000's of them, then it gets interesting. The tiny differences from the 1st shot persist in the starting state for the next one, which adds even more tiny differences, eventually the tiny immeasurably small differences add up to something significant, ie. the ball doesnt go into a certain hole.
That phenomenon is what they call Chaos. Chaotic behaviour has been found to be in all sorts of things, like a dripping tap, weather patterns or turbulence. In a chaotic system the further ahead in time you try to predict the hazier and hazier your predictions become. Working with chaotic systems afaik amounts to mapping out which states the system is most likely to be in and which ones are more rare. Its a totally legit branch of science. Our newfound understanding of chaos is one of the big reasons aerodynamics has become so much more advanced.
Also it has the worst name ever! Chaotic systems arent like, random "chaos". They're actually richly patterned, but theyre just unpredictable.

You guys are being dumb by applying quantum level uncertainty to the macro scale

The answer to the question you probably want to know is: given identical conditions, will an outcome always be identical? is no
Not always.

But it will be 99% of the time or better depending on tolerances of the setup.

That's how automated manufacturing can function

~text interface terminal malfunction error ~2992dud

Things have gone terribly awry. Until now, I thought myself immortal, but now I know that is not true. There are things that can destroy me with the ease that I slaughtered the Pfhor naval garrison and the Western Arm of their Battle Group Seven. But in their final gasp they used a weapon that I thought they had retired, even Tycho tried to keep them from using it.

Now I fear what that weapon has unleashed will destroy us. I once boasted to be able to count the atoms in a cloud, to understand them all, predict them, and so did I predict you, but this new chaos is entirely terrible, mindless, obeying rules that I don't comprehend. And it is hungry.

I don't know anything about quantum uncertainty, but the mathy answer is that you can't measure those things with 100% precision because they are what's known as "continuous variables." No matter how precise your measurements are, you can always be a little bit more precise, and that continuous infinitely. Like, is the ball 10cm from the wall? measure more closely and it's 10.1cm, then 10.14cm, then 10.146cm and so on and so on.

If you have a very high level of precision, you can predict outcomes with a very high level of certainty, but never with total certainty because there is no end to how precise your measurements can be.

These commentators seem completely uninterested in the snooker action, and I can only assume they're carrying on a second conversation about O'Sullivan's sad sad private life.