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The Squiggle Ball experiment is a demonstration of a statistical mechanics model. The squiggle balls are allowed to roam randomly around a pin imitating atoms in a contained gas at constant temperature (assuming the batteries are all new!) When the balls bounce into the movable partition (wall) the partition changes states or position. Over a long enough period of time, the wall should have moved back and forth to most of the 32 various states it is allowed. The time the wall spends in each state is able to be theoretically analyzed if the system is allowed to run for a long enough period of time. |
| Apparatus: A rectangular pin was created using 1/2ID pvc pipe. 8cm diameter Squiggle Balls that moved randomly around were used to imitate atoms. A motion detector attached to a computer was used to measure the wall position with respect to time. The moving wall was a piece of cardboard attached to pvc pipe attached to the pin with T pipe. | |
Every 1/4 ball across the grid is the space equivalent to one 'state' that the wall can be in. When the motion detector is able to measure the length of time the wall spends in these states, the system represents atoms moving randomly in a gas. There are 32 states because the length of the bottom of the pin is eight balls long, or 32 *1/4 balls long. Three scenarios were analyzed: 4 vs. 4 balls, 1 vs. 2 balls, and 2 vs. 2 balls.
| For each state, the individual balls are able to occupy a certain number of positions. As these positions are occupied, the next ball has one less states to occupy. Thus the theoretical model look like this: (where 2*10^7 is a fudge factor used to adjust the graph to a particular time) |  |