Newton’s cradle with an end stop

Abstract

A Newton’s cradle experiment is described where the end ‘ball’ was much heavier than the rest and acted as an end stop. The experiment was conducted to examine the elastic response of billiard balls to a measured impact force, as well as the behaviour of a billiard ball chain in a cradle. The results agree well with a Hertzian force law and are qualitatively similar to those for a conventional cradle. If the balls are initially touching, all balls recoil away from the end stop, at varying speeds.

The dynamics of Lato Lato ball collisions

“…The collision in the Lato Lato game involves two moving hanging balls. It is different from the collision that happens in Newton's cradle when a moving hanging ball hits another unmoving hanging [5][6][7] or in billiard ball games when one ball with a specific velocity hits another unmoving ball on the billiard board [8][9][10]. Therefore, this work will enrich the discussion regarding the collision of two objects, complementing the work reported by other authors [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14].…”

“…When the two balls meet at the initial position, they collide once again (figure 2.6). Conservation of momentum states that the sum of the momentum of the two objects before and after the collision is the same [3,5,6], as stated by…”

Demonstration of conservation of momentum using Lato Lato 2.0

“…One of the important physics concepts that needs to be proven is the law of conservation of momentum. The Newton Cradle is a popular demonstration tool for showing collisions and momentum conservation [1][2][3][4][5]. In this work, we employ an alternative method, utilizing the second generation of Lato Lato toys (Lato Lato 2.0) to demonstrate these ideas.…”