Newton’s Cradle

Posted on July 20, 2008 by

Previous animation post

I have added a Newton’s Cradle animation to the animation file posted previously:

Animation.zip

The animation finds the correct period for the input string length and starting angle, and displays the movement of the balls in real time.

This entry was posted in Animation, Drawing, Excel, Newton and tagged , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

3 Responses to Newton’s Cradle

  1. mrt says:
    July 23, 2008 at 5:20 am

    Hi Doug –

    Very neat, but Newton seems to have lost his gravity 😉

    The balls never come to rest.

    …Michael

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  2. dougaj4 says:
    July 29, 2008 at 10:19 am

    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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  3. Pingback: By Jingo « Newton Excel Bach, not (just) an Excel Blog

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