eli5, when a moving object bounces off of another, does it momentarily stop moving?
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At a certain point in the object’s movement the object’s velocity in a direction will equal to zero. Where it will then move in the opposite direction at a different velocity.
No. Velocity and speed are not defined at an instant but over and interval. it doesn’t make sense to say that an object was stationary or moving at time t. Something is moving if after delta time there is also a delta position . No matter how small you make the delta time around time of the collision there will always be a positive delta position.
Yes, but your phasing can be confusing. It’s less that the moving object stops moving, and more that the forces that are moving the object momentarily equal each other. Except for things like a wreking ball hitting a house, cause the wreking ball just slows down instead of coming to a stop.
If you take a ball and throw it up in the air, at some point it comes back down due to gravity. By throwing it, you gave it some upwards motion. This upwards motion is then continously counter acted by gravities downward motion. At the peak of the balls height, both upwards and downwards motion equal each other, before the downwards motion becomes dominant and the ball begins to fall down.
There are a number of ways for objects to interact when they hit each other. Let’s assume that your talking about an object that can move that hits an object that can’t, so like a rubber ball hitting a wall. When you throw the ball at the wall, it travels at it with some motion. When the ball hits the wall, that motion reverses and the ball comes back to you. At some point in that interaction, the motion you gave to the ball plus the motion the ball is currently receiving from the wall would be equal to zero, otherwise the ball would move through the wall.
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