Cannonball on cannonball, this is all cannon
There’s no ‘ cancel out’ there would be a violent kinetic reaction as all the energy is released when the cannonballs collide. Depending on the muzzle velocity you would get something between smushed cannonballs to a massive expanding sphere of iron shrapnel and slag, assuming they were aligned perfectly.
so they would cancel each other out?
I don’t think so. This mythbusters clip is a good example of two sets of energy inputs canceling each other out. In the double cannon experiment OP posits the energy becomes additive.
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 outcorrection: 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.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.
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.
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)
Not an answer but some contextual information on the colliding bullets of Gallipoli:
tl;dr they did not collide.
Mythbusters covered this for musketballs. In the description of the myth, they said there were several examples recovered from American Civil War battlefields
But SmarterEveryDay recreated it.
yeah but fuck smartereveryday and his better than thou christian bullshit
when has Destin ever been “better than thou”?
I’m not christian myself, hell I’m probably anti-theist at heart, but this is the guy who spoke at Skepticon about how his scientific mind and his religious mind coexist, and (according to this article) it was well received.
As much as I abhor Christianity I really don’t think the SmarterEveryDay guy is the “holier than thou” type of Christian. He seems like the kind of jesus freak that I could actually sit down with and have a mutually respectful discussion and actually agree to disagree amicably.
Of course I only know about his youtube presence. If he’s actually said or done bad shit outside of there, I’d like to know.
Damn, I didn’t know he was disliked … wtf did he do (actually don’t answer that).
He committed the sin of having a religion. He occasionally- very occasionally- mentions his Christianity in some videos. I don’t recall any proselytizing, but I haven’t kept up to date.
Huh, never noticed that in any of his videos, though I’m also not up to date with his content. Still, the videos stand on their own, I don’t care about his personal views if they don’t impact his works.
