D. Bernoulli: from Masslets and Springs to the 1-D Wave Equation

In a gas, the forces between particles can become quite large when two particles are near, but these forces are of the same magnitude but opposite in direction and there is then some cancellation effect; in a limiting process, when the number of particles gets large and one rescales their masses, one will find that some sequence may converge in the sense of distributions but not in the sense of Radon measures.