The Physics of Playing Pool
Meet physics major Joaquin Fernandez Odell.
Hometown: Fort Collins, Colorado
Thesis adviser: Professor Joel Franklin [physics]
Thesis: “A Continuum Model for Physical Billiards”
What it’s about: The physics of pool. I started playing a lot of pool during my freshman year. There’s this guy who made these pool tutorial videos informed by physics, Dr. Dave, who’s an engineering professor at Colorado State University. My thesis is really an extension of what he and other pool nerds have been thinking about.
What it’s really about: How much interesting physics there is, even in seemingly boring places.
In high school: I was the band and science kid (I played the trombone). I had all these academic clubs I did with my friends. Every lunch we had a different science competition we would participate in—Science Bowl, Ocean Bowl, anything you could imagine.
Influential class: Thermal Physics with Professor Noah Charles [physics]. I had done a research experience the summer before in solid-state physics, and I had been exposed to all these different ideas that I had no familiarity with. I took Noah’s class and it was very well presented—it was an engaging, interesting class, and every unit offered an explanation for something I had heard about but didn’t know the specifics of. It was a very enlightening experience.
Outside the classroom: When I first got here post-COVID, the ÈËÆÞÓÕ»ó Ultimate Frisbee Club was basically nonexistent. Now, it’s rebuilt itself as a ÈËÆÞÓÕ»ó institution. It’s cool to be part of something that grew from almost nothing into something that I think will stick around and have an identity for a long time.
Influential book: A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking. I think that was the first book I read that made me think that physics was cool. What really got me was the chapter about the arrow of time. We have this concept of time being one direction, but the way he explained it is that time comes from the tendency of the universe to go towards states of higher probability. He connected the conceptual to the perceptual.
Concept that blew my mind: Band structure in solid-state physics. The big idea is that you move from thinking about things in real space—and then you make a transformation to what’s called reciprocal space, which is taking the periodicity of real space and collapsing it all in on itself. That transformation makes solving problems in situations where you have billions or trillions of atoms much easier, mathematically and conceptually. That simple switch in perception allows you to solve all these complicated and difficult problems.
What’s next? I’m going to Yale, where I’ll be in the physics program hoping to study quantum information.