Newton's cradle Newton's cradle Newton’s cradle is a device that demonstrates conservation of momentum and energy using a series of swinging spheres. When one sphere at the end is lifted and released, it strikes the stationary spheres, transmitting a force through the stationary spheres that pushes the last sphere upward. The last sphere swings back and strikes the still nearly stationary spheres, repeating the effect in the opposite direction. The device is named after 17th-century English scientist Sir Isaac Newton. It is also known as Newton's balls or Executive Ball Clicker. A typical Newton's cradle consists of a series of identically sized
Center-of-momentum frame vanishes and thus the total energy coincides with the rest energy. Systems that have nonzero energy but zero rest mass (such as photons moving in a single direction, or equivalently, plane electromagnetic waves) do not have COM frames, because there is no frame in which they have zero net momentum. Due to the invariance of the speed of light, such massless systems must travel at the speed of light in any frame, and therefore always possess a net momentum magnitude that is equal to their energy divided by the speed of light: An example of the usage of this frame