Blog 6: Collisions

This weekend my friends and I decided to have a friendly volleyball tournament.  I was super excited because even though I'm horrible at volleyball, I knew I'd see a lot of examples of momentum and collisions that I could blog about!  In this picture you can see the Bret (left) has hit the ball toward Sean (in the red) who is trying to block it.  The volleyball's momentum is equal to its mass times its velocity.  After Bret hit it, the ball then collided with Sean's hands and bounced back towards Bret.  A bouncy collision! The collision created an impulse which is equal to change in momtum or force times mass.  The ball experienced a large change in momentum so it its impulse must have been pretty big.  Because the time that the ball was in contact with Sean's hands was extremely short, that must mean the the force was very large (J=F  t ) .  Ouch, his hands must've hurt after this from all the force...