A stroke pulls together coiling, ground force, wind and spin. Contact is just a few milliseconds of it.

The strings only ever meet a compressed sphere. They don't feel the ball.

Expert athletes' brains prepare a response to the sounds of their own sport.

fMRI measures a blood flow response four to six seconds late, not neurons firing.

When a person hits a tennis ball, the moment of contact is infinitesimally small: A few milliseconds when the ball lands on the strings, which stretch backward ever so slightly and then slingshot the ball forward and up into the court.

Thinking that science measures reality is like thinking that everything about a tennis shot can be determined by the measurement of contact.

But a tennis stroke consists of movement to the ball. The coiling and stretching of various muscles. Compressing one's legs and using the ground to propel the force through the feet and the legs, up through the torso, which uncoils as the force moves through into the shoulder, the arm, and finally the hands.

Then the ball travels through the air, interacting with gravity, wind, and the texture of the court that changes the spin the ball has.

If a tennis player were a scientist, she would only be able to measure the very moment of impact. It is the only point at which the instrument touches what is being studied. The only moment at which the strings meet a compressed sphere.

Timothy Morton, in Humankind, puts it plainly: science "can never directly talk about reality, only about data."

It turns out that the strings don't actually hit a ball. At least not the one I see inside the tennis can when I open it and pull it........

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