Newton's Cradle

Newton's cradle — an ideal equal-mass, one-dimensional elastic collision exchanges the two approaching velocities, so lifting N balls sends N out the other side. This animation adds pendulum arcs and resolves overlapping simultaneous contacts in repeated left-to-right passes; it is not a full three-dimensional contact simulation. The damping control is applied between integration steps, separately from the ideal collision rule. The energy index compares the current schematic pendulum energy with its release value, so its decline shows damping loss rather than an inelastic impact loss. Total horizontal momentum is only a contact diagnostic here: gravity and string tension mean it is not conserved over a whole swing.