I have added a Newton’s Cradle animation to the animation file posted previously:
The animation finds the correct period for the input string length and starting angle, and displays the movement of the balls in real time.
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Hi Doug –
Very neat, but Newton seems to have lost his gravity 😉
The balls never come to rest.
…Michael
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mrt – they wouldn’t move at all if there was no gravity!
But yes, I did assume no loss of kinetic energy at the collisions, which makes everything much simpler.
Maybe I’ll get around to putting in some collision losses one day, but to do it properly it would mean that after the collision all the balls would have some velocity, so the next collision would not occur exactly at the low point, so I’d have to keep track of the position and velocity of every ball, and check for collisions of every pair of adjacent balls at evey step.
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