Elastic collisions retain the total kinetic energy of objects after impact, while inelastic collisions lose some energy to other forms. Large objects never have fully elastic collisions due to energy loss, but billiard balls provide a quasi-elastic example.
An elastic collision occurs when the total kinetic energy, or energy of motion, of two or more objects is the same after a collision as before the collision. Unlike an inelastic collision, no energy is transformed into another kind. Fully elastic collisions don’t usually happen in the real world, except between subatomic particles, but the collision of two billiard balls is an approximation.
There are two types of collisions. The first is an inelastic collision, which is more common in everyday life. During an inelastic collision, some of the kinetic energy, or motion energy, is lost upon impact. This energy is converted into another type of energy, such as sound or heat. In an elastic collision, all of the kinetic energy of the two objects is retained during the impact.
Before two objects collide, each of them possesses a certain amount of kinetic energy and momentum. The amount of kinetic energy depends on the mass and speed of each of the objects. Because of the basic law of conservation of energy, which states that energy can never be destroyed, the total energy after two objects collide must be the same as before the collision. If it is an elastic collision, then all the energy remains as kinetic energy and is simply moved from one object to another.
In reality, no collision between large objects is ever truly an elastic collision. This is because, when large objects collide, some of the kinetic energy is always lost to various other types of energy, such as sound, heat, or the object’s compression. In the microscopic world, such as the magnetic interaction of atoms or electrons, there is a possibility that the collision is elastic, because there is no physical contact between the objects. Gravitational interactions between planets are also sometimes classified as perfectly elastic collisions.
An example of a quasi-elastic collision in the real world is the interaction between two billiard balls. When the white ball is hit, it gains a certain amount of kinetic energy, which it then transfers when hitting another ball. If the collision occurs in a straight line, all of the kinetic energy is transferred to the target ball, meaning that the white ball stops dead and the target ball moves at exactly the same speed. If the balls hit at an angle, the kinetic energy is split between the two.
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