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-----Original Message-----
From: phys-l-bounces@carnot.physics.buffalo.edu [mailto:phys-l-
bounces@carnot.physics.buffalo.edu] On Behalf Of John Denker
Sent: Tuesday, November 23, 2010 11:22 AM
To: Forum for Physics Educators
Subject: Re: [Phys-l] question about Bernoulli
and by what mechanism was it reduced?
Particle/particle collisions.
Each collision can be visualized in terms of points on a sphere
in six-dimensional phase space. Ignoring the mass for simplicity,
we have:
v1x^2 + v1y^2 + v1z^2 + v2x^2 + v2y^2 + v2z^2 = E = constant
Each collision will cause the system to random-walk on the
sphere. If every collision were one-dimensional (i.e. zero
impact parameter) we would not have a random walk, but since
the impact parameters are random we do. The energy will soon
be distributed over all the accessible states.
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