The Assignment is described below.
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Your assignment is as follows.
Repeat the following experiment six times (or more if you have enough
patience): write down how much time it takes for the blue ball
until it first touches the green ring, when starting from the center.
Average your results.
(A stopwatch is provided for your convenience.)
Next, answer: how many
seconds will it take, on the average, for the ball to leave a ring whose
radius is 3 times as big as the one shown?
(This takes one line: you should use the fact that "the average time taken to
diffuse a distance d is proportional to d^2")
Important: The "reset" button in the simulation doesn't seem to work. I find I have to reload ("refresh") the page to re-start the simulation. In some browsers, just using the Reload button in your browser will not work well, in which case you need shift-reload (keep the shift key pressed down while you click on reload).
In case you want to play with parameters, these can be changed in the source
code for the page that you are seeing:
nballs: number of red balls,
averagevelocity: the average velocity of the red balls.
Increasing temperature will correspond to the red balls (which could represent
water molecules) moving faster.
This is adapted by E. Sontag from:
Copyright (C) 1998 Michael Fowler mf1i@virginia.edu
Please
click
here for source code and GNU License details.