Timeline for Do vectors imply the superposition principle?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
7 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Nov 14, 2020 at 15:26 | comment | added | GiorgioP-DoomsdayClockIsAt-90 | It is not enough that something has magnitude and direction to justify its modeling via vectors. A rotation in the space may be characterized by a magnitude and a direction, it is possible to define a product by a scalar and a sum of rotations (as the resulting rotation), but the sum fails to be associative and rotations cannot be represented as vectors. | |
| Nov 14, 2020 at 12:50 | comment | added | Ben Martin | Yep that's correct :) | |
| Nov 14, 2020 at 12:49 | comment | added | Herr Feinmann | I see your point. Mathematically the sum exists, but it does not necessarily represent a physical quantity, more specifically the force acting on the particle. The principle of superposition gives a meaning to that sum as the total force. | |
| Nov 14, 2020 at 12:47 | comment | added | Ben Martin | The position of a particle is a vector, and hence the sum of particle positions is defined. However this sum is not a useful quantity. Griffith is making the point that the sum of the coulomb forces could have been like that (perhaps due to some weird interaction effect) | |
| Nov 14, 2020 at 12:42 | comment | added | Herr Feinmann | In a vector space a sum operation is defined, though. | |
| Nov 14, 2020 at 12:36 | review | First posts | |||
| Nov 14, 2020 at 15:21 | |||||
| Nov 14, 2020 at 12:28 | history | answered | Ben Martin | CC BY-SA 4.0 |