Physics 7A Ramamoorthy Ramesh August 23, 2012 Lecture 1

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Introduction
This whole semester is going to be looking at the movement of objects. Various kinds of objects. Solid objects, air, liquid objects, and space objects. As you go more into heat and thermodynamics, you see more of that (space objects). When you go into 7C, you deal with small scale objects. Were now going to do what we call Newtonian objects. We treat macroscopic objects as point objects.

chapter 1, its that its common sense. Many of you are engineers and youll want to be quantitative. There is one thing to remember and thats units. I have this discussion with my grad students often. You say your salary is 100,000 and you ask what currency. And that is very important between Indian rupees, Japanese yen, etc. As an engineer, you can make a huge design mistake. You will be evaluated for your usage of units in this class. If you dont have units, GSIs are authorized penalize. Another common sense are is dimensional analysis. As we go through the semester, we will be dealing with complex equations. Its a good way to calibrate your units. As we go through this process, we will make some mistakes and we need to be able to catch up on that. Im going to write an acronym, now: OOM (Orders of magnitude). In engineering, youre not really looking for an exact answer. Say I ask for the distance from that wall to that wall. You need a simple way to estimate what that distance is, a gut feeling. In an exam, you should have a gut feeling that you got a goofy

Lecture
The primary focus of part 1 of our discussion, is how do I understand the movement of objects. There are two parts to it: 1. How do objects move? This is formally called kinematics. 2. Why do objects move? This is formally called dynamics. Well spend two minutes going back and looking at chapter 1. If theres one summary for

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answer. You are under the pressure of an exam but you can still say Im looking for some constant, say acceleration, and if it doesnt come out to be a certain magnitude, its important for you to notice that. One more thing about units. If you can use SI system, that will be preferable. Make it a part of habit. Another thing to be aware of is what are the uncertainties? That will be useful in your years of education. Reality isnt the exact answer, but that you cover the estimates and the uncertainties. Essentially, this is all chapter 1. Be sure to go back and review Chapter 1. This brings us to chapter 2. Were going to start looking at movement of objects. Were going to start with some denitions. How do objects move? The question were asking today: If Ramesh is walking in a straight line how does he start moving and how does he keep moving. Here are some key commodities: 1. Location. (Where is Ramesh?, x ) 2. Time 3. Rate of change of location (The time rate of change of location, which means how fast is Ramesh moving? Well call this at this moment, velocity or v ) 4. Rate of the rate (acceleration or a) These four commodities will be related into one general equation. Typical framework is do some algebra, do some discussion and do some calculations. Most of the time we will not be able to nish calculations. I deliberately do that so that you can go back and gure it out. Were going to look at the relationships between these four things. This is something

called Kinematical equations. These basically relate all four commodities. Well also look at instantaneous and time average commodities.

Frame of reference, this is important. We will mention this today but we wont mention this until various parts of the 7A/B/C curriculum. Most of the time our frame of reference is Eart but Earth is a rotating object. We wont factor that in but it is important to remember that. It becomes a little more complicated if we want to deal wtih that.

Any questions about distinguishing between velocity and speed? Would you have a stomachache if I mentioned the two and you dont know whats the dierence.

Student 1: Yeah, I would have a stomachache because if you say speed I wouldnt know where youre going Student 2: Speed is a scalar quantity; velocity is a vector quantity.

For todays discussion wee going to talk about velocities in one direction. On Teusdya, you can velocities going in three dierent directions. Well talk about that on Tuesday.

Any questions on instantaneous versus average velocity. On my previous board, we talked about various rules. Its always a good idea to draw a picture as you go through the problem: "Ok, this is what the problem Im solving for and this is the best way to solve it."

Im going to draw time versus displacement graph (Figure 1). And my object is moving this way on a straight line from x1 to x2 . I can get the average velocity: total distance over total time.

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Well look at cases where the acceleration is constant. Can you think of an example? Student: Apple falling from a tree. Good, a Newtonian example. Most of the time this doesnt happen, for instance when youre driving a car. Well deal with this on Tuesday and Thursday. Were going to accomplish the relationship between these four commodities. Much of this is simple and done in the book. Well state a few things and make up the relationships. Figure 1: Time vs. Displacement You have a scenario in which you are looking at some arbitrary reference time. Could be as simple as you are starting a car. How do time, displacement, velocity and acceleration relate to each other? I would say my x is some x0 . This now says Ramesh is standing here called x0 . Then Ramesh is moving faster and faster. How do I describe this motion? The starting point is x = x0 and v = v0 . These are the initial conditions. In most cases, not all, you will have 0 initial velocity. If I have the assumption that acceleration is constant, I can have these as the boundary conditions for my problem. 1. x = x0 2. v = v0 3. v = 4. a =
xx0 tt0 vv0 t

Lets say I make this a little more complicated and I ask what is the instantaneous velocity (red graph). I will take a very small element of this: vinst = dx As I keep decreasing the windy dow of time, as I make t smaller and smaller, going to zero, the value of instantaneous velocity is dx. This is the instantaneous slope. For the red curve, the slope is changing all the time. I will do this for another commodity we talked about, velocity (Figure 2). I can do the same thing for aceleration. The instantaneous slope here is instantaneous acceleration.

xx0 t

= x = x0 + v t

v = v0 + a t

We can now use all these denitions. We can get the rst of the kinematical equations. First get: of the kinematical equations we

1. x = x0 + v t + 0.5 a t2 (This tells you total displacement with velocity, v, and acceleration, a) Figure 2: Time vs. Velocity
2 2. v 2 = v0 + 2 a (x x0 ) (This eliminates time and relates velocity, accelera-

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tion and displacement) This brings us to our rst problem which is actually a life experience Ill tell you, which was actually goofy at that point but wasnt very funny afterwards. This was my frist year at grad school. A bunch of grad students went to LA for Disneyland on the 5. The guy was driving 100 mph. And on the 5, you can easily go 90 or 100. This was at 2 in the morning and really going fast...right by a car cop. This is the problem Im going to write for you. Example 1. Ramesh et. al getting nailed by a cop. The rst question we are asked: there is a speeding car which is a constant speed (50 km/hour zone at 75 km/hour). I will depict time as one of my aixs and location (with respect to a point which we will ge to in a second). If you were to describe our cars trajectory, how would you describe it. Student: A straight line. We were doing this (straight line)

Cop has to accelerate; he has no choice. This is why this has a parabolic shape and i salso why you see a square relationship in equation 1. Q1: What is x2 ? Q2: What is the cops speed? How do I nd these two commodities using what i know from these kinematic equations. I will use the appropriate descriptors of itme and position. Our car is not accelerating. How can you describe the motion of our car, given the kinematic relationships? What kind of formalism would you use to describe? Student: a = 0 and xt = v t How about the cop? Student: v0 = 0 and x = 0.5 a t2 What else can I say about his velocity, velocity is related, no? I can dene the velocity. v2 = 2 a x So we can use all of these to dene the movement of the police car. I know I have some distance, some x-value. The police car has caught up to give a ticket. I can solve these now. The next step: What is the algorithm? Start with drawing a picture. You are setting up a thinking process, look, this is what I think is going on. Describe the picture in an analytical way. Now you can begin to analyze this. Last step is to plug in the numbers. Say, ok this is where they will meet. We can say:

Figure 3: Us vs. Cop

xf inal = vus t = 0.5acop t2 vu s = 75km/her ac op = 2.5m/s2 Us and cop are at the same location. Is there one or two points we are at the same location? You will see there are two points at which we are at the same locations. From this point on, its a matter of solve. Step 4: Solve. Im goin to skip and I will give you the numbers for velocity and acceleration. Be

The cop of course was stationary. We will draw the two cars here. The cop has a better car and can go to whatever speed. Cop shown by yellow chalk is going like this. Speeder is going at some speed. Where does the cop catch up and how fast are they going.

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careful when you convert to SI. You can go ahead and solve for the location of the cop. We will go through two more examples today. We used two kinematic relationships in this problem. One moving at a constant acceleration and one at a constant velocity. And we solved for their displacement. We can be solving for other commodities such as time Example 2. Well start with another example which is a very realistic example. Lets say youre landing a plane at a landing speed. What would you prefer: land into the wind or with the wind? The problem were going to talk about is how to land the plane. Which way would you like to land?

The plane can land several hundred meters away from the end but we will disregard that. What kinematics can I use to describe the movement of the plane? Student: vf inal is 0 I know I am accelerating at some value and I know that will conclude at a velocity of 0. Can you propose a kinematical pathway to solve for this? Which relationship is useful?
2 Student: v 2 = v0 + 2 a (x x0 )

Ill call this some x. My acceleration is a negative quantity because you are decelerating. My next step is to solve for delta. ONce you do that I will write down the nal form of it which is a simple number. x comes out to be 625 meters. This is the bare minimum oftentimes it is much larger because you dont know where the plane will stop. By the way, you will see that these are real distances. If you get a distance of 62 meters. You know you missed some order of magnitude number.

Figure 4: Plane Landing Student 1: You takeo into the end, so it should be the opposite. Student 2: You want to use the wind to help you decelerate Question. Are you going 180 without the wind? You will be moving at 150 relative to ground. Say you have 1.5 kilometers for a runway. So you have to stop, constrained by this distance. Problem were going to work out is the distance or displacement while decelerating. This is part of the kinematic equations. Problem says: What is the minimum runway length? So we are looking at displacement which is with respect to some reference point.

Question. Will we have to memorize conversions? I hope not. You will be allowed a cheat sheet on exams. We agreed in the past, that we will have one sheet backside and frontside 8.5*11. Mainly, to mak eyou feel comfortable for the exam. Of course you can use calculators for the exam. Any questions on these two? Basically, these are relatively simple problmes with one dimensional conversions. Lets look at the scenario that embodies this constant acceleration. Someone was talking about this with the apple business. Example 3. Acceleration due to gravity g = 2 . This is a standard value. 9.8m/s If I throw up the chalk, the question is how

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do I describe the movement of the chalk. This is worked out in the book. A million dierent books have the same example. Its an important example because people used to not think this was true. If you take away damping forces, if you have any kind of object, both objects will fall the same way. As long as you take away all other things. I was going to pull up a video; theres Tom Pettys Free Falling. Were going to look at free fall under gravity. I learn through pneumonics. Thats why we use some of these, I hope it will stick You will need to learn your own pneumonics. As we talked aobut this before, draw out the problem. Im standing away a meter from the surface and toss up the chalk. I want to describe th emotion of the chalk. Up and down will have meaning. Im at this point throwing the chalk up. This whole trajectory we are going to hammer away at for a while. Were using an y-axis instead of an x. Still a one-dimensional analysis.

Details: y0 = 1.5meters Reference frame is earth v = 7.3m/s Q(1): Whats ymax ? Q(2): Whats velocity when it passes your hand? Youll see two dierent forms of the kinematic equations. Solving for the relationships between the four commodities. Next step, in this process is to identify the appropraite forms of the kinematic equations Clearly, y will show up y = y0 + v t + 0.5 a t2 Velocity term is useful because we know initial velocity. Velocity at the peak is 2 going to be 0 v(@ymax ) = 0 = v0 + 2 2 2 g (y) a(y) = 0 v0 We will nish this problem Tuesday and look at this in 2D. Its a little more complicated. End of Lecture. Notes transcribed by Stephanie Chang. Edited by Nick Gwynne.

Figure 5: Jumping

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