Question

In curling, you will often see one curling stone hit another and come to rest while the stationary stone moves away from the one-dimensional collision. Explain how this can happen.

Answer 1

In curling, when one curling stone hits another, momentum is transferred and conserved, causing the moving stone to stop and the stationary stone to start moving. By conducting an experiment with ice cubes, we can observe similar behavior demonstrating the conservation of momentum in elastic collisions.

Step-by-step explanation:

In curling, the phenomenon where one stone hits another and then comes to rest while the stationary stone moves away illustrates the conservation of momentum. This is a result of a one-dimensional elastic collision, where the total momentum and kinetic energy of the system (both stones) are conserved.

During such a collision, momentum is transferred from the moving stone to the stationary one, possibly causing the first stone to stop and the second stone to move away with a velocity determined by the conservation principles. As a simplified experiment, flick one ice cube toward another on a smooth surface to observe analogous behavior.

Assuming we are dealing with point masses to avoid the complication of rotation, we notice that the speeds and directions of the ice cubes after the collision give insight into the conservation of momentum. If the ice cubes do not exhibit any rotation, the collision is more straightforward to analyze, just like in curling where typically the stones should not be rotating significantly.