By Anupum Pant
Have you tried balancing a small bouncy ball on top of a basketball and then dropped them together? If you haven’t, you should try it once. The bouncy little ball somehow bounces really high, much higher than it would have gone individually. How does that happen?
The difference is massive. Normally the small ball would bounce back about 70% of the height it was dropped from. But the tree ball stack makes it go 8 times the height it was dropped from. That’s a lot, isn’t it?
And then, did you know the tiny ball goes even higher when you have 2 bigger balls under it when they are dropped? How does it all work. Well, for us engineers the understanding comes very naturally, because we try to locate the source where the tiny ball gets the energy, which clearly isn’t from the gravitational potential – As it bounces 8 times its initial height. Physics girl, a relatively newer science channel which has been making really quality videos lately, explains.