Tell me more ×
Physics Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for active researchers, academics and students of physics. It's 100% free, no registration required.
up vote 0 down vote favorite

An object travels from point "A" to "B" towords East with velocity of 10 m/s . And then it travels form point "B" to "C" towords North (CHANGE IN DIRECTION) again with velocity of 10m/s . So in this case :

  1. There would be NO acceleration

  2. Yes, there would be some acceleration

( I think answer should be (2), as acceleration is vector. Want to confirm, yes or no ? )

share|improve this question
this is not a do my homework type of forum. Show us what you have done and where are you stuck – lurscher Dec 14 '11 at 15:11
The acceleration ${\bf a}:=\frac{d{\bf v}}{dt}$ is only defined for a differentiable velocity profile $t\mapsto {\bf v}(t)$. But OP's velocity profile $t\mapsto {\bf v}(t)$ is, in the most naive interpretation, not even a continuous function. In other words, the problem should include smooth information about how the turn is made in (the neighborhood of) the point $B$ in order to be able to estimate the acceleration. – Qmechanic♦ Dec 14 '11 at 15:13
It's just a conceptual question. I just wanna know, if there would acceleration or "NO" acceleration at all. To my knowledge, answer should be "YES", as acceleration is vector. I just wanna confirm if the answer is "YES". – Vishwas Gagrani Dec 14 '11 at 15:21
Well, you can safely rule out case (1). Do you know why? – Qmechanic♦ Dec 14 '11 at 15:30
Why rule out case ? I mean, is it because, the acceleration is supposed to occur ( and would have some numerical value) just because it changed direction ? – Vishwas Gagrani Dec 14 '11 at 15:43
show 3 more comments

closed as too localized by Mark Eichenlaub, Colin K, David Zaslavsky♦ Dec 14 '11 at 17:08

This question is unlikely to help any future visitors; it is only relevant to a small geographic area, a specific moment in time, or an extraordinarily narrow situation that is not generally applicable to the worldwide audience of the internet. For help making this question more broadly applicable, see the FAQ.

Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.