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My apologies for such a basic question--I am a musician, not a physicist. But I cannot anywhere find the word, if one exists, that describes that elegant pause of an object such as a ball, thrown straight up, as it reaches the apex of its trajectory's power and before it obeys the power of gravity commanding it to earth.

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In musician's terms, isn't it anacrusis? – user404153 Sep 25 '12 at 3:50
In rock-climber terms, it's a "deadpoint" :-) – Andrew Sep 25 '12 at 4:08
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I know you were writing poetically, but to be a bit pedantic: This pause lasts zero seconds, the instantaneous velocity of the ball is zero only at a point in time. The ball is obeying the power of gravity as it ascends - because it's velocity is continuously reducing in accordance with v=u+at. – RedGrittyBrick Sep 29 '12 at 17:11

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I don't think there is a word apart from "apex" or its various synonyms. For orbiting bodies we use the prefix "ap" e.g. aphelion is the point an object orbiting the sun is furthest away, or apastron is the equivalent for a star. A object thrown up is in principle orbiting the Earth (OK, it's a highly elliptical orbit :-) so I suppose the apex of its flight would be the apogee.

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I note that even though they both start with ap, the word apogee is from a Greek root while apex is Latin. I suppose the Latin word might also originally have come from a Greek root. – John Rennie Sep 25 '12 at 6:59

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