PHYS W2801 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Inertial Frame Of Reference, Fictitious Force, Pythagorean Theorem

• School: Columbia University
• Department: Physics
• Course: PHYS W2801
• Professor: robertmawhinney

Document Summary

For example, if the true acceleration of an object is100 m/s 2, but you observe it to be moving at. 90 m/s2, then you are in a non-inertial frame: then you can use newton"s laws to get the fictitious force. Isolate masses: draw diagram, define coordinates, set up equation, constrain the equation time, etc, solve problem. This is very easy using what we know about integration. For freely falling bodies the acceleration will be g. You can add vectors using the head-to-tail method (using the pythagorean theorem) You can also scale vectors by multiplying each dimension by a constant. If you are given any three numbers, such as temperature, shoe size, and height that could constitute a vector in a purely mathematical sense by constructing a vector field. However, in terms of physics since it cannot be translated in 3-d space, it would not be a vector.