Guys
The coin rotation paradox has caused many minds to melt! It can easily be shown physically that with 2 coins of equal size - (I always favor 2 silver dollars pieces!) then the moving coin rotates twice. David Ding has produced an elegant proof for those those who like to tidy up loose ends.
His proof is found here:-
www.davidyding.com/navPages/coinRotation
In any discussion it is important to define the initial conditions and this is what Ding says:-
"
How many revolutions does a circular coin make while rolling around another circular coin of the exact same size without slipping?"
"At first glance, the intuitive answer might be, well, one. After all, the rolling coin has a circumference, say c, and it is rolled, without slipping, against another coin with circumference c. This is basically saying how many revolutions does a circle with circumference c make while rolled against a path with length c. Surely, the answer is one?
Well, the actual answer is
two. And this seemingly strange result is called the “coin rotation paradox” and that Wikipedia has a
short article describing it. Here, I will use math to solve this paradox in the general case and dish out some insights for the general result."
Ding's final equation is as follows:-
Where rf and rr are the radii of the coins so if the coins are identical then N=2. To fully understand this you will need to work through the other 4 equations.
Note that Ding's proof covers coins/disks of any size provided the ratio of the disk radii is an integer.
Mike