  The dynamics of a system consisting of many spherical hard particles can be
described as a single point particle moving in a high-dimensional space with
fixed hypercylindrical scatterers with specific orientations and positions. In
this paper, the similarities in the Lyapunov exponents are investigated between
systems of many particles and high-dimensional billiards with cylindrical
scatterers which have isotropically distributed orientations and homogeneously
distributed positions. The dynamics of the isotropic billiard are calculated
using a Monte-Carlo simulation, and a reorthogonalization process is used to
find the Lyapunov exponents. The results are compared to numerical results for
systems of many hard particles as well as the analytical results for the
high-dimensional Lorentz gas. The smallest three-quarters of the positive
exponents behave more like the exponents of hard-disk systems than the
exponents of the Lorentz gas. This similarity shows that the hard-disk systems
may be approximated by a spatially homogeneous and isotropic system of
scatterers for a calculation of the smaller Lyapunov exponents, apart from the
exponent associated with localization. The method of the partial stretching
factor is used to calculate these exponents analytically, with results that
compare well with simulation results of hard disks and hard spheres.
