Timeline for Feynman Lectures Chapter 4.2: Understanding the weight-lifting machine visually
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
5 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Nov 22, 2020 at 11:18 | comment | added | Paul Razvan Berg | I see, thanks for the caveat. I've just started learning physics as a hobby and this is good to know. | |
| Nov 22, 2020 at 11:14 | comment | added | Andrew | OK I see what you mean. Having said that in my experience it's not so uncommon to hear physicists refer to "weight" in both of these ways, so unfortunately this is a level of ambiguity you might just have to get used to. Even worse, eventually you'll get the point where people use the same symbol to mean two (or more) different things, and you need to work out which meaning is meant from context. So it's a good idea to develop some "thick skin" around overloaded terminology. | |
| Nov 22, 2020 at 11:09 | vote | accept | Paul Razvan Berg | ||
| Nov 22, 2020 at 11:09 | comment | added | Paul Razvan Berg | Great answer, but let me be pedantic enough to retort that "units, weight, boxes ..." aren't interchangeable terms in either Feynman's explanation or yours. If you assert that one box = one weight, you cannot say "remove a little weight from the right hand side" because there is only weight on the right balance pan. Or, you could say it, but you would ascribe two different meanings to the word "weight", one for the drawing of the box, the other for weight as in the force acting on the object due to gravity. Which makes for an unnecessarily confusing explanation. | |
| Nov 22, 2020 at 10:52 | history | answered | Andrew | CC BY-SA 4.0 |