page_title: Billiard ball
section_title: In popular culture
hierarchical_section_title: Billiard ball / In popular culture
caption_attribution_description: English: Picture of the face of a magic 8-ball taken by me on August 16, 2007.
context_page_description: A billiard ball is a small, hard ball used in cue sports, such as carom billiards, pool, and snooker. The number, type, diameter, color, and pattern of the balls differ depending upon the specific game being played. Various particular ball properties such as hardness, friction coefficient and resilience are important to accuracy.
context_section_description: The 8 ball is frequently used in Western, especially American, culture. It can often be found as an element of T-shirt designs, album covers and names, tattoos, household goods like paperweights and cigarette lighters, belt buckles, etc. A classic toy is the Magic 8-Ball "oracle". A wrestler, a rapper, and a rock band have all independently adopted the name. In the Seinfeld episode "The Reverse Peephole", the character Puddy wears a jacket featuring the eight-ball.
  The term "8-ball" is also slang both for ¹⁄₈ ounce (3.5 g) of cocaine or crystal meth, and for a bottle of Olde English 800 malt liquor. It has also been used to refer to African-Americans, particularly those of darker skin tones, as in the film Full Metal Jacket. The expression "behind the eight [ball]" is used to indicate a dilemma from which it is difficult to extricate oneself. The term derives from the game kelly pool. 
  Because the collisions between billiard balls are nearly elastic, and the balls roll on a surface that produces low rolling friction, their behavior is often used to illustrate Newton's laws of motion. Idealized, frictionless billiard balls are a staple of mathematical theorems and physics models, and figure in dynamical billiards, scattering theory, Lissajous knots, billiard ball computing and reversible cellular automata, Polchinski's paradox, contact dynamics, collision detection, the illumination problem, atomic ultracooling, quantum mirages and elsewhere in these fields.
  "Billiard balls" or "pool balls" is the name given to balls used in stage magic tricks, especially the classic "multiplying billiard balls". Though obviously derived from real billiard balls, today they are usually smaller, for easier manipulation and hiding, but not so small and light that they are difficult to juggle, as the magic and juggling disciplines have often overlapped since their successful combination by pioneers like Paul Vandy.
  The phrase "as smooth as a billiard ball" is sometimes applied to describe a bald person, and the term "cue ball" is also slang for someone who sports a shaved head.An urban legend received cultural attention to many saying, "If the Earth were the size of a billiard ball, it would be smoother". It was used in 2008's Discover Magazine stating no diameter variations measuring +/-0.005" should be made, but mistook the diameter tolerance for smoothness. If the Earth were reduced to the size of a billiard ball, its mountains and trenches would equal the texture of 320 grit sandpaper and the variation in diameter would be 0.0049", which is near the maximum diameter tolerance. (see also: Earth's Shape)
caption: A Magic 8 Ball
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