Timeline for What causes displacement?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
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| Mar 31, 2021 at 1:25 | comment | added | Cort Ammon | And related to that: I don't know whether you have been taught calculus or not, but modern physics makes a lot more sense at this level when you can use calculus on those mathematical structures. Without calculus, there's a lot of simply accepting the handwaving that it works. Calculus provides a much more rigorous framework within which one can try to understand science's concept of motion. | |
| Mar 31, 2021 at 1:24 | comment | added | Cort Ammon | If you really want to go as far down that rabbit hole as Physics will go, take a look at the concept of Phase Space. Phase Space is the tool we use to capture this connection between reality (where we have 'motion' in the philosophical sense) and a mathematical structure (where we can take the derivative with respect to time and call it 'motion') | |
| Mar 31, 2021 at 1:20 | comment | added | Cort Ammon | Which is a long way of saying, "which causes the other?" Well, that's like asking whether a coin is a heads side which happens to have a tails side connected to it, or if the coin is a tails side with a heads side connected to it. Quite literally, at the science level, it's like asking a fish to be aware of the water it breathes. Philosophy will go further, but you'll find it just offers more questions. | |
| Mar 31, 2021 at 1:19 | comment | added | Cort Ammon | What we can say, very unscientifically, is that if we can construct a system corresponding to some equations, and let it play out, doing whatever reality does, we find that we very reliably can predict what reality does. And, perhaps equally important, if we define a system (such as with your two cars), its relatively easy to construct that system.. often by using more physics equations to shepherd reality towards the initial conditions of our model. | |
| Mar 31, 2021 at 1:17 | comment | added | Cort Ammon | Turning it around again, if we start from the problem, where we have a police car accelerating at 2m/s^2, that's a model of reality. It isn't reality itself. Cars don't necessarily have accelerations. However, if you set up TheCar and ThePoliceCar in real life, and they didn't have the desire properties of motion, we would say that TheCar and ThePoliceCar did not match the model, so we need to get a new car and new police car, and try better next time. | |
| Mar 31, 2021 at 1:15 | comment | added | Cort Ammon | The best answer I can give is Netwon's first and second laws. Newton invented Calculus to be able to capture such things definitively. So perhaps the more reasonable answer is to flip the claim around. State that there is a scene with TheCar and ThePoliceCar, and the describe the relative motion we will see for them. We will state that ThePoliceCar has an acceleration of 2m/s^2 because that lets our model fit reality. Choosing a different acceleration would not meet our reality. | |
| Mar 31, 2021 at 1:01 | vote | accept | cylinde | ||
| Mar 31, 2021 at 1:01 | |||||
| Mar 31, 2021 at 1:00 | comment | added | cylinde | +1. In the meantime, what is a less-correct (but acceptable) way to explain why one car has moved farther than another? Side question: do you know of any cases where we/science knows what causes another thing? | |
| Mar 30, 2021 at 23:50 | history | answered | Cort Ammon | CC BY-SA 4.0 |