Oblique and Head-On Elastic Collisions

摘要

When a moving ball collides elasticallywith an identical,initially stationary ball,the incident ball will either come to rest(head-on collision;see Fig.1)or will acquire a veloc-ity that is perpendicular to that acquired by the targetball(oblique collision;see Fig.2).These two possibleoutcomes are related in an interesting way, which wedescribe in this paper.