Yesterday I attended the UH versus New Mexico State football game – my first live UH football game, might I add, and only my second time sitting in Aloha Stadium. Honestly, the (unnecessarily) loud, screaming fans and blinding bright lights don’t do much for me, but that’s okay because at least I got to experience some physics while I was there.
I didn’t take any pictures of my own, but this one will do:
I will refer to the UH player as A, the other as B, and assume that they were running toward each other from opposite directions prior to the collision. The collision that these two players experienced was a perfectly inelastic collision, so momentum was conserved but kinetic energy was not, and the two players ended up “stuck together” (Hmm, what if it had been an ordinary inelastic collision and they had bounced off of each other instead... o_O). Anyway...if we give the two players random masses and initial velocities... (A has a mass of 110 kg and was moving at a velocity of 5 m/s and B has a mass of 90 kg and was moving at a velocity of -5 m/s) we can solve for the common final velocity of the two players upon impact because we know that momentum is conserved.
No comments:
Post a Comment