Related papers: Dodecahedral bowling
We demonstrate that the free motion of any two-dimensional rigid body colliding elastically with two parallel, flat walls is equivalent to a billiard system. Using this equivalence, we analyze the integrable and chaotic properties of this…
The escape of an ensemble of particles from the Bunimovich stadium via a small hole has been studied numerically. The decay probability starts out exponentially but has an algebraic tail. The weight of the algebraic decay tends to zero for…
Have you ever played or watched a game of pool? If so, you have already seen a billiard system in action. In mathematics and physics, a billiard system describes a ball that moves in straight lines and bounces off walls. Despite these…
Glueballs and Hybrids are solid predictions of QCD, but none have this far been identified in an undisputable way. We list several strategies, including the very promising search for "cascade" decays of glueballs and hybrids into each…
Using fractal analysis, we investigate how the size of openings affects the chaotic behavior of a classical closed billiard when two openings are made on the boundary of the billiard. This kind of open billiards retains chaotic properties…
Globular clusters are relics of the early Universe and they hold clues to many aspects of stellar and galactic evolution. We propose to point the Roman Space Telescope at one or more clusters either as a part of or as an extension of the…
In this paper, we define a variant of billiards in which the ball bounces around a square grid erasing walls as it goes. We prove that there exist periodic tunnels with arbitrarily large period from any possible starting point, that there…
We present a game inspired by research on the possible number of billiard ball collisions in the whole Euclidean space. One player tries to place $n$ static "balls" with zero radius (i.e., points) in a way that will minimize the total…
We study bounded domains with certain smoothness conditions and the properties of their squeezing functions in order to prove that the domains are biholomorphic to the ball.
It is shown that tiling in icosahedral quasicrystals can also be properly described by cyclic twinning at the unit cell level. The twinning operation is applied on the primitive prolate golden rhombohedra, which can be considered a result…
When identifying instruments that have had great influence on the history of physics, none comes to mind more quickly than the pendulum. Though 'birthed' by Galileo in the 16th century, and in some respects nearly 'dead' by the middle of…
This paper proves the following statement: {\it If a convex body can form a twofold translative tiling in $\mathbb{E}^3$, it must be a parallelohedron.} In other words, it must be a parallelotope, a hexagonal prism, a rhombic dodecahedron,…
We introduce Quintessence: a family of burr puzzles based on the geometry and combinatorics of the 120-cell. We discuss the regular polytopes, their symmetries, the dodecahedron as an important special case, the three-sphere, and the…
Billiard systems, broadly speaking, may be regarded as models of mechanical systems in which rigid parts interact through elastic impulsive (collision) forces. When it is desired or necessary to account for linear/angular momentum exchange…
It is commonly believed that the ancient Romans were the first to create and use concrete. This is not true, as we can easily learn from the Latin literature itself. For sure, Romans were able to prepare high-quality hydraulic cements,…
A very fundamental geometric problem on finite systems of spheres was independently phrased by Kneser (1955) and Poulsen (1954). According to their well-known conjecture if a finite set of balls in Euclidean space is repositioned so that…
We design a computational experiment in which a quantum particle tunnels into a billiard of variable shape and scatters out of it through a double-slit opening on the billiard's base. The interference patterns produced by the scattered…
The dodecahedral conjecture states that the volume of the Voronoi polyhedron of a sphere in a packing of equal spheres is at least the volume of a regular dodecahedron with inradius 1. The authors prove the conjecture following the…
We study the collision between the cue and the ball in the game of billiards. After studying the collision process in detail, we write the (rotational) velocities of the ball and the cue after the collision. We also find the squirt angle of…
Geodesic domes, convex polyhedrons with almost spherical shape or parts of them, were the subject of great attention in the twenty years between the mid-1950s and the 1970s, especially thanks to Richard Buckminster Fuller. After a building…