Don't Lose Your Marbles Over This

When I was thinking about what to do for this blog, I had no good ideas. I didn't want to do anything snowball or ice related because I knew that everyone was going to be doing those. When I actually assessed what I could use to show the conservation of momentum, the results were not very good. I originally was going to use some toy cars that I had lying around, but the frictional force was far too great to get any accurate results. Then I figured, Why not marbles? So after searching my house I managed to find a marble and use it to show the conservation of energy.

In this video, I placed a marble of 10 grams on a smooth surface and rolled at a hard speaker. I chose a speaker, because it is hard and smooth and produced good results. I rolled the marble at a velocity of  3.805 m/s at the speaker. It then, hit the speaker and bounce back travelling at a velocity of 0.182 m/s. Assuming that friction is negligible, then the initial Kinetic Energy of the marble would be 0.00724 Joules and the Final Kinetic Energy, after bouncing off the speaker would be 1.656 x 10^-5 Joules. After performing calculations, the results state that 99.771% of kinetic energy was lost. 

I'm assuming that most of the energy was transferred into sound and heat because the collision let out a load pop noise when the marble hit the speaker. I always find it interesting how different theoretical and real collisions are. When doing the number on paper they always seem "neater" and much less energy is lost, but in real life collisions so much energy is transferred into many different things.

Data:

Calculations: