A well‐known collision experiment can be carried out with an arrangement of several elastic balls suspended in a horizontal row. As we have shown in a previous article a necessary condition for the observed, simple behavior of this arrangement during collision is that the perturbation propagates throughout the system without dispersion. In the present paper, we show that the arrangement can be described by a series of spatially separated masspoints and springs of a special type: the exponent of the force law of the springs is 1.5 according to a theory of H. Hertz. It follows that the first collision sequence of such an experiment is not completely dispersion free. Indeed, slight dispersion during the first collision sequence creates the conditions for the total absence of dispersion in all the subsequent collisions.

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© 1982 American Association of Physics Teachers.
1982
American Association of Physics Teachers
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