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[RAD11]

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Can someone explain to me the table and graph in Physics Lecture 4-4 Intuition about Collisions (it's regarding elastic, partially elastic, and inelastic collisions). They're supposed to help make simple predictions regarding collisions and help answer qualitative questions, but I'm having trouble understanding it. Thanks!

 

[DrBowtie]

Can someone explain to me the table and graph in Physics Lecture 4-4 Intuition about Collisions (it's regarding elastic, partially elastic, and inelastic collisions). They're supposed to help make simple predictions regarding collisions and help answer qualitative questions, but I'm having trouble understanding it. Thanks!

It's pretty goofy. Basically it is just a graph that is supposed to save you some time.

The green line is the inelastic collision where both masses have the same final velocity.
The pink region is the velocity of the incoming mass after the collision and the blue is the velocity after the collision of the second mass.

Basically to sum it up, if the incoming mass is really big compared to the stationary one, you can see their relavite velocities going off to the right.

If the incoming mass is really small and hits a large mass it isn't going to move the large mass which is why the blue is going to zero on the left.

I wouldn't worry about memorizing this.
Let me know if you need more explanation.

 

[RAD11]

Hey Brett,

Thanks for the reply. Actually, I started doing the momentum problems in the 1001 EK Physics while looking at the table/graph. I started to understand it better and did pretty good. I'll just keep on doing practice problems.