From 56 to 2
The other day I was experimenting with 56 perfectly elastic balls in a box but it took too long to measure the KE of each ball so I simplified it to 2. One of the balls has twice the mass of the other but apart from that they are the same. My original idea was to make a hole in the shell so that one ball would fly out, I'd then measure the KE of that ball. What I was hoping to show was that with two balls I'd get something like a beta radiation spectrum. I then realised that it would be more efficient to simply measure the KE of one of the balls continuously and then plot a histogram of energy distribution after every collision. The KE vs time looks like this.
Using this, it is quite easy to extract data of how many times the KE was between two values then use this to plot an energy spectrum. The result looks promising but needs more data. IA investigation anyone?
