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What would happen if two cannons fire a cannonball at each other at the exact same angle and the canonballs hit each other perfectly head-on, do they cancel out? (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 month ago by to c/nostupidquestions@lemmy.ca
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Cannonball on cannonball, this is all cannon

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[โ€“] 5 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (3 children)

Not quite cannonballs but this clip from some charming Aussies shows what happens when you fire lots of things at each other. In short, if you could perfectly line them up and keep them from shattering, yeah they kinda cancel each other out correction: they'd bounce directly apart like billiard balls. In practice, they hit slightly off center and also shatter, results are what you'd probably expect.

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  • [โ€“] 4 points 1 month ago (2 children)

    If they hit perfect and don't shatter, the energy has to go somewhere. Wouldn't they act like billiard balls and bounce back in the opposite angle? In a perfect elastic conditions, of course.

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  • [โ€“] 5 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 child)

    Hmmm... you're right. I was originally thinking of it as two force vectors adding together to create a zero sum, but that wouldn't be right because they're two separate objects (if the cannonballs were perfectly adhesive to one another, then they'd create a single object and do what I originally thought).

    In perfect conditions they'd each transfer their kinetic energy into the other and they'd fly apart at the same velocity. So yeah, very much like billiard balls. Good intuition.

    I'm an electrical engineer, I only took static mechanics in school.

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  • [โ€“] 3 points 1 month ago*

    Now you've got me wondering about a perfect adhesive reaction and where the energy goes. The velocity is zero (before gravity begins to pull down), so I guess they both heat to mv^2 then however you convert that to actual heat. (I haven't had a physics class in a very long time)

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