I was watching a video; the amount of collisions made between two colliding blocks on a frictionless surface with walls on either side that have infinite mass always equals the digits of pi. So say one block is 100kg (block A) and the other is 1kg (block B) and we are assuming perfectly elastic collisions, the total amount of collisions before block Ahits the opposite wall would be 31. We keep increasing block A’s mass and the numbers go up: ex. 314 at 10 000kg, 3141 at 1 000 000kg.
After that video I tried to understand *why* this happens but I am no mathematics expert. If we’re being honest here “elastic collisions” was a stretch for me haha I had to reach back to my high school physics memories.
In: 323
It’s a repeating system, so it possesses properties like frequency and period. Those can be described in phase space, which basically transcribes motion in real space to angular terms (so instead of saying the block was at 2 meters at 2 seconds, and then 0 meters at 3 seconds and then 2 meters again at 4 seconds, you can say the period required for the block to make a full cycle is 2 seconds.) Calculations involving phase space naturally lend themselves to invoking pi.
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