ChatterBank18 mins ago
Surface areas of touching snooker balls
How can you measure it?
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For more on marking an answer as the "Best Answer", please visit our FAQ.short answer: perhaps put some felt tip pen ink on one of the balls, then put it next to the other, so that it touches, and you can remove them and see how much ink has passed.
area of a sphere (approximate the snooker balls to a sphere - hey i'm a physicist!) is:
A(sphere) = 4 pi r^2
so measure the width of your snooker ball, that'll be its diameter. divide by two to get its radius (r in the above equation). this will let you calculate the entire area.
assume that the area of the dot made by the ink is small enough (compared with area of entire sphere) to be treated as a circle, and find its area by
A(circle) = pi r^2
where this r is the radius of the circle made by the ink.
area touched as a percentage = A(circle) / A(sphere)
As Bernardo says if the spheres are perfect then they would not actually touch. The 2 atoms that are closest to each other being 99.9% empty space would simply give the impression of touching using the Nuclear force.
However they spheres are not perfect so the ink transference method seems good to me!
At an atomic level things don't youch in the conventional sense. Take the simplest atom, hydrogen now if the nucleus was the size of the head of a pin then on that scale the electron would be orbiting 1km away. so if two of them where next to each other the nuclear forces would preven overlap. So the only way they could be deemed to be touching is if the electrons from each atom where to collide.
I think that's what Bernardo is getting at anyway!
No, the same reasoning would not apply to cubes. If two cubes were touching, and were perfect cubes, then it would be poissible for the whole face of one cube to be touching the face of the other cube. When two spheres are touching, only a singular point is touching and therefore has no area.
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