First, here's a recent video about Pi from Professor Ed Copeland involving a strange way that Pi "appears" when objects collide.
Of course what Ed described was really a "thought experiment" because it would be difficult to create a frictionless environment and elastic collisions.
But that's viewer where Lukas Wolf comes to the rescue.
He was captivated by our video and re-created the experiment using a piece of software called Algodoo.
Lukas has also made his code available at this link (for those who have the Algodoo software, which can be downloaded for free).
And Lukas sent us this image, which I believe charts the velocity of the small ball.
In his email to us, Lukas said:
"I was quite amazed by your 'pi and bouncing balls' video, certainly a cool fact about pi that I didn't know. Because it was so amazing, I replicated the scenario in a simulator and plotted the velocities of the balls over time while counting the collisions between the balls. The results were great: On the 32nd collision big M started to move backwards."Many thanks Lukas.
And don't miss our full collection of Pi videos.
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