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Atoms bouncing off each other collapses their waves.That doesn't even parse.
There's something you need to understand.
It has already been pointed out, but you have missed it.
Imagine making a grating with a gap between the "wires" that's a little bit smaller than the molecules you are using.
Classically, no particles will get through it.
QM and the uncertainty principle means that a few will. They will quantum tunnel through.
Here's the bit you don't understand.
If you take the grating and hammer it until the wires are squashed flat and there are no gaps so it becomes a metal foil then repeat the experiment...
More atoms will get through the foil even though it no longer has gaps in it. (In some circumstances)
Do you understand that?
The probability of tunneling is related to the thickness of the barrier.
Hammering it flat makes it thinner and so it's more likely that atoms will tunnel through.
Obviously, with the grating destroyed, there's no diffraction pattern.
And the (smaller number of) atoms that went through the grating before you hammered it flat would also show no clear diffraction pattern because, at that level, the atoms are not going through the gaps.
It's the same , classically, with light
You know the equation
d sin θ = λ
Where lambda is the wavelength and d is the spacing
you can rewrite that as
sin θ = λ /d
Well, if you make d smaller than lambda then you are trying to find an angle where sin theta is more than 1, but that's impossible.
Diffraction doesn't work if the wavelength is bigger than the grating's spacing.
And, returning to QM, a particle can't be "smaller" than the associated wavelength.
So, you can't sensibly calculate a diffraction pattern for the the experiment you have proposed.
So there's no way to say whether the particles would follow it or not.
And, as has been pointed out before, you also can't measure it because, in practice big things don't go through small holes.
You mention acceleration in your post, but not in the title.
Quote from: HalcMore likely, the meteors will come from all directions and add pretty much no net momentumThe vast majority of objects in our Solar system orbit in the same direction, so any objects hitting the Earth would add their momentum to the Earth's momentum, travelling in the same direction around the Sun.
It is only the occasional object from the Oort cloud (or the even rarer interstellar visitor) that might have a retrograde orbit as it passes around the Sun.Quotein which case it will drop to a lower orbit since a larger mass with the same momentum will move slowerIn this case, the increased mass of the Earth would carry the sum of Earth's momentum and the momentum of the colliding objects, which would have the Earth continue in pretty much its same orbit.
Of course, if there were a collision with a single really big object (like the hypothetical collision that formed the Moon), that could change Earth's orbit significantly.