What are elastic collisions?

Elastic collisions are when two things bump into each other and both keep moving without losing energy, like they’re super bouncy.

Imagine you have two toy balls, one red and one blue. You roll the red ball toward the blue one that’s just sitting there. Plink! They hit, and then they both roll away, the red one maybe a little slower, and the blue one zooming off like it was excited to be pushed. That’s an elastic collision!

Think of it like bouncing on a trampoline. When you jump, you go up, then come back down, and if someone else is jumping too, you might even push each other around, but neither of you gets tired or slows down much. It’s like the balls in our earlier example: they keep their energy when they bump into each other.

In real life, elastic collisions happen between things like billiard balls on a pool table, smooth and bouncy enough to keep going after every hit!