28 Balls
Puzzling and creepy science at work:
“The video consists of a locked off shot of an empty parking lot. A centered sodium vapor light illuminates the night landscape. 28 red balls bounce up and down in a chaotic random order. As the video reaches its mid point, the balls align themselves until they reach the point where they all bounce at the same precise moment and then resume to go back into chaos.”
Link and video from environmentalgraffiti.com.
that is wicked cool
I want to know how the balls don’t lose thier energy to gravity with each bounce. All of them also bounce in the vertical with no apparent lateral lmovement which you would expect to occur on anything but the smoothest surface, and parking lot suface arenot usually perfectly level and smooth.
It is a cool vid, though.
It looks animated, to me. But it’s neat, nonetheless.
@rick
if you followed the link, it explains. It’s a locked off camera, with the same ball, bounced once in 28 locations, and looped.
If you watch each individual ball, you see that it bounces between two parts of the surface repeatedly.