Thank you! After reading this and discussing it a bit, she had the follow up question of :
Ok, that's a lot of pressure, but I don't get how much. If you could somehow contain all of that pressure in a magic bottle, and the top of it blew off when you put the very last possible bit of pressure into it, and it could go on forever because nothing would stop it but friction from the air around it (when I asked her she said like, Earth's air), then how fast would it go and how far would it go before it stopped?
The "smallest thing" is up for debate. An electron certainly doesn't qualify, though, as sub-atomic particles have been theorized for decades.
Otherwise, these answers are dead-on (from a first-year mechanics point of view). Note also that in question 2, when the balls bounce back out of the tube, they will do so with the same velocity (in the opposite direction) as they had going in. They would stop moving when they got up to the height of your hand.
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Thank you! After reading this and discussing it a bit, she had the follow up question of :
Ok, that's a lot of pressure, but I don't get how much. If you could somehow contain all of that pressure in a magic bottle, and the top of it blew off when you put the very last possible bit of pressure into it, and it could go on forever because nothing would stop it but friction from the air around it (when I asked her she said like, Earth's air), then how fast would it go and how far would it go before it stopped?
Yeah. I can't answer that one either.
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Otherwise, these answers are dead-on (from a first-year mechanics point of view). Note also that in question 2, when the balls bounce back out of the tube, they will do so with the same velocity (in the opposite direction) as they had going in. They would stop moving when they got up to the height of your hand.
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