Sunday, November 23, 2008
physics of fetch
This weekend i was playing fetch with my dog chewy and i realized that the two toys that i was throwing had to very different behaviors. The first toy i threw was stuffed animal. When i threw this toy it would fly through the air in a projectile like path and hit the ground and slide to a stop. The second object i threw was a tennis ball which also traveled in a projectile like path but it hit the grown and changed velocities in a bouncy collision several times before rolling to the rest. Both of these objects have about the same mass and were thrown at around the same velocity and same trajectory however, the tennis ball had a larger impulse. This is because the tennis ball had a greater change in velocity due to the bouncy than the stuffed animal did that had no vertical velocity after it hit the ground. I also noticed that the coeficeint of friction between the stuffed animal and the floor was greater than the tennis ball rolling on the floor because the ball traveled further after it stopped bouncing.
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