Chaos on Conics
I recently came across this video by Alex Gustafsson . It describes that particles, initially separated by a very small distance, spread out in a chaotic manner when falling on a (perfectly elastic) circular wall; but not for parabola. I wondered what happens with other conic sections, and so made a quick project for that (with a *little* help from ChatGPT). Here's the repo . The main things that I saw was that only circles are chaotic. Not really sure, what's going on, but I think it needs careful investigation. My first guess was that the eccentricity for circles is exactly zero (and it is "more" symmetric in a certain sense, but why that would lead to chaos is not clear to me. In the meantime, enjoy these videos (they are circles, elllipses, hyperbolas, parabolas in that order) .