"The Billiard Ball" is a science fiction short story by American author Isaac Asimov, written in September 1966 and first published in the March 1967 issue of If.
An example of what Asimov called his "late style,"[1] the story is a journalist's recollection of the events surrounding the discovery of an anti-gravity device in the mid-21st century.
Energy can be freely created in a volume of space time which is pulled "flat," as defined within the Theory of Relativity as determined by Albert Einstein.
There is also the unprovable speculation as to whether Priss knew, from his own theory and the nature of the blue glow produced by the field (possibly due to Cherenkov radiation), what would happen, and if he then directed the ball in such a way as to kill Bloom.
[citation needed] Asimov severely underestimated the destruction which a billiard ball moving at nearly the speed of light would cause; in reality, collisions with air molecules alone would have released energy comparable to an atomic bomb blast and killed everyone in the room.