Re: Do atoms bounce non- stop?

Though your experiment is interesting, it is not necessarily true that the
ball bounces half its previous height each time. Did you use a squash ball,
then a football, a bowling ball, or a super ball ? you will find you get
radically different results. And watch out for your fingers with that
bowling ball....

No, you observed the loss of energy at each impact, energy being lost from
the moving ball system and converted into heat in the surface of the table
and in the material of the ball, not forgetting the sound energy
(especially with that bowling ball)

So, sadly no, there is no "magic number", and atoms don't follow the same 
rules at all. Things at that scale no longer follow what we would call
common sense rules at all, and interactions become possibilities and
likelihoods rather than certainties. Atoms don't "bounce" by falling under
gravity, but wobble around at a rate proportional to their temperature.

Steve