Questions tagged [acceleration]
The rate of change of velocity of a body per unit of time.
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Don't heavier objects actually fall faster because they exert their own gravity?
The common understanding is that, setting air resistance aside, all objects dropped to Earth fall at the same rate. This is often demonstrated through the thought experiment of cutting a large object ...
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Why do spaceships heat up when entering earth but not when exiting?
Recently I read up on spacecrafts entering earth using a heat shield. However, when exiting the Earth's atmosphere, it does not heat up, so it does not need a heat shield at that point of time yet. ...
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How and why do accelerating charges radiate electromagnetic radiation?
Let's consider it case by case:
Case 1: Charged particle is at rest. It has an electric field around it. No problem. That is its property.
Case 2: Charged particle started moving (it's accelerating)....
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Does a charged particle accelerating in a gravitational field radiate?
A charged particle undergoing an acceleration radiates photons.
Let's consider a charge in a freely falling frame of reference.
In such a frame, the local gravitational field is necessarily zero, ...
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Why does a free-falling body experience no force despite accelerating?
Note: For the purposes of my question, when I refer to free fall assume it takes place in a vacuum.
From my (admittedly weak) understanding of the equivalence principle, falling in a gravitational ...
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In a roller coaster, does the rear car have a higher acceleration/speed?
I am wondering about this question since I asked myself: why do people feel more weightless in the rear car of a roller-coaster than in the front car?
To feel the effect of weightlessness, you must ...
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If I'm floating in space and I turn on a flashlight, will I accelerate?
Photons have no mass but they can push things, as evidenced by laser propulsion.
Can photons push the source which is emitting them? If yes, will a more intense flashlight accelerate me more? Does ...
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Does a constantly accelerating charged particle emit EM radiation or not?
The Abraham-Lorentz force gives the recoil force, $\mathbf{F_{rad}}$, back on a charged particle $q$ when it emits electromagnetic radiation. It is given by:
$$\mathbf{F_{rad}} = \frac{q^2}{6\pi \...
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Why doesn't a braking car move backwards?
The net force on an object is equal to the mass times the acceleration, $F = ma$
When I brake on a (moving) car, the net force is negative, therefore causing the resulting acceleration to also be ...
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Why can electric cars recoup energy from braking, but a spaceship cannot?
It is said that in a spaceship, you need to spend as much energy to brake as you spent for accelerating. An electric car, however, charges its batteries while braking, thus it actually recovers energy ...
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If I drop a ball in an accelerating rocket, will it bounce? If so, how?
Einstein's equivalence principle says that you cannot distinguish between an accelerating frame or a gravitational field. However, in an gravitational field, if I drop a tennis ball, it will bounce, ...
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Slinky base does not immediately fall due to gravity
Why does the base of this slinky not fall immediately to gravity? My guess is tension in the springs is a force > mass*gravity but even then it is dumbfounding.
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Why do heavier objects fall faster in air?
We all know that in an idealised world all objects accelerate at the same rate when dropped regardless of their mass. We also know that in reality (or more accurately, in air) a lead feather falls ...
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Why can’t gravitons distinguish gravity and inertial acceleration?
If gravitons mediate the gravitational force, couldn’t the detection of gravitons by an observer be used to distinguish whether they are experiencing gravitational acceleration vs. inertial ...
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How is the energy loss by an accelerating charge expressed in the equations of motion?
I understand how, and why, an accelerating charge emits radiation, and loses energy in the process, as well as the Larmor formula for the power, and its derivation.
However, in classical mechanics, ...
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When a car accelerates relative to earth, why can't we say earth accelerates relative to car?
When a car moves away from a standstill, why do we say that the car has accelerated? Isn't it equally correct to say that the earth has accelerated in the reference frame of the car? What breaks the ...
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Why is acceleration expressed as m/s/s?
I'm a philosophy student (I, regrettably, don't know calculus or much physics). Last year I spent some time learning how work, power, speed, velocity, energy, force, and acceleration relate. But I was ...
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What's wrong with this argument that Newton's second law implies all potentials are quadratic?
Newton's second law states:
$$F(\vec{x})=m\vec{\ddot{x}}$$
For $\vec{x}$ scaled by some arbitrary constant $s$, we obtain:
$$F(s\vec{x})=ms\vec{\ddot{x}} \Longleftrightarrow \frac{F(s\vec{x})}{s}=m\...
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Why doesn't the Earth accelerate towards us?
According to Newton's third law of motion that states that every action has an equal and opposite reaction.
So, if the Earth exerts a gravitational pull on us (people) then even we should exert a ...
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Why do two bodies of different masses fall at the same rate (in the absence of air resistance)?
I'm far from being a physics expert and figured this would be a good place to ask a beginner question that has been confusing me for some time.
According to Galileo, two bodies of different masses, ...
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What would put a harddisk drive (HDD) under 350G's of force?
I always see the label and it says 350G's withstandable. What would put this over 350G's? Is it even possible to hit 350Gs of force to a hard drive?
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Would it help if you jump inside a free falling elevator?
Imagine you're trapped inside a free falling elevator. Would you decrease your impact impulse by jumping during the fall? When?
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What is the gravitational force acting on a massless body?
It's a well known fact that acceleration due to gravity is independent of the mass of the accelerating body, and only depends on the mass of the body it is accelerating towards and the distance from ...
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Is there a maximum possible acceleration? [closed]
I'm thinking equivalence principle, possibilities of unbounded space-time curvature, quantum gravity.
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Can an object *immediately* start moving at a high velocity?
What I mean is, suppose a ball is fired from a cannon. Suppose the ball is moving at 100 m/s in the first second. Would the ball have started from 1m/s to 2m/s and gradually arrived at 100m/s? And is ...
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Mass and Newton's Second Law
While trying to understand the second law of Newton from "An Introduction to Mechanics" by Kleppner and Kolenkow, I came across the following lines that I don't understand:
"It is natural to ...
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Zero velocity, zero acceleration?
In one dimension, the acceleration of a particle can be written as:
$$a = \frac{dv}{dt} = \frac{dv}{dx} \frac{dx}{dt} = v \frac{dv}{dx}$$
Does this equation imply that if:
$$v = 0$$
Then,
$$\...
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Acceleration in special relativity
I am currently studying the motion of relativistic charged particles in electromagnetic fields. More exactly, we first derived the equation of motion in the 4-vector formalism.
I was a bit confused ...
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If you're accelerating and you drop a ball, why does the ball keep your velocity, but not your acceleration?
There was a question in my physics text book which says, "A boy is running with velocity $5m/s$ and acceleration $2m/s^2$ north, and drops a ball while running at the height of 5m from ground. ...
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What came first, Rice Crispy or "Snap," "Crackle," and "Pop"? [closed]
The fourth, fifth, and sixth derivatives of position are called "Snap" "Crackle" and "Pop". What came first, the rice crispy characters, or the physics units?
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Why does mass limit acceleration?
If a force of $10\,\mathrm{N}$ is applied to different objects of different mass in empty space, in the absence of gravity, why do lighter objects accelerate faster than heavier objects? Why does mass ...
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What symmetries would cause conservation of acceleration?
I have recently been trying to see what consequences Noether's theorem would have if our world was setup with different symmetries.
It is a quite elegant result that the invariance of the Lagrangian ...
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Does velocity or acceleration cause time dilation?
What causes time dilation? Acceleration or velocity?
I've seen multiple comments on this forum that assert velocity is the cause, but that doesn't seem right to me. You can't have velocity without ...
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Is there a limit to acceleration? [duplicate]
As we all know the speed of light is the limit at which energy/matter can travel through our universe.
My question being: is there a similar limit for acceleration? Is there a limit to how quickly ...
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Why do these two ways of understanding constant acceleration give different results?
I have a question pertaining to the concept of acceleration and it's formula - Both seem to give me different answers.
I was asked:
A train is moving at a velocity of $20\ \mathrm{m/s}$. It hits ...
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Why don't you feel gravity the same way you feel a car's acceleration? [closed]
If you are in an accelerating car or spaceship you feel an apparent force pushing you backwards, which as I understand is due to your own body's inertia (it wants to keep its current velocity but the ...
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Is there any fundamental reason why acceleration is a linear function of external forces?
Perhaps a trivial question, but it is something which I couldn't ever grasp ever since beginning physics. Why exactly should Newton's second law be linear in application of all the external forces?
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Do accelerated charges radiate or not? [duplicate]
This questions has been asked all over the net (here included) but I can't find a satisfactory answer or discussion. Some say it does not radiate if the acceleration is caused by a uniform gravity ...
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The instant an accelerating object has zero speed, is it speeding up, slowing down, or neither?
This problem is from Khan Academy. Specifically for the blue point circled in red, the answer is that at this blue point, the object is neither speeding up nor slowing down. When I think about the ...
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What happens when the drag force exceeds the weight of an object falling into earth?
Let's say a meteor is coming towards earth. It's not accelerating, but it does have an initial velocity. This meteor is shaped so it has an insane amount of drag, enough to even exceed its weight (not ...
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Does a long vertical pole fall at a different speed than a short vertical pole?
The formula for a falling object has $r^2$ in the denominator. This would mean that an object that is higher up falls more slowly than the standard $9.807\ \mathrm{m/s^2}$ that we are taught in high ...
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A simple derivation of the Centripetal Acceleration Formula?
Could someone show me a simple and intuitive derivation of the Centripetal Acceleration Formula $a=v^2/r$, preferably one that does not involve calculus or advanced trigonometry?
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How to get distance when acceleration is not constant?
I have a background in calculus but don't really know anything about physics. Forgive me if this is a really basic question.
The equation for distance of an accelerating object with constant ...
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Does an accelerating electric dipole radiate?
For such a simple question I'm finding it remarkably hard to get a definitive answer. Googling has not helped me. Consider an ideal electric dipole that is constant i.e. neither its magnitude nor ...
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Can you jump higher if you run? If so, why? (High jumping)
I have often wondered why high jumpers can jump higher if you run. The way I see it is that you only build up horizontal speed, and since you're running on a plane, I cannot see how this speed can be ...
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Why doesn't the Earth's acceleration towards the Moon accumulate to create noticeable motion of the earth, towards the moon
I get that Earth's mass is very large, so its acceleration is very tiny. But wouldn't the acceleration accumulate over a period of time and become noticeable?
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Force as change in momentum vs. change in velocity
Is there ever a situation where the distinction between $F = m \frac{dv}{dt}$ and $F = \frac{dp}{dt}$ is important? I can't think of a situation where one is true and not the other (assuming only ...
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How can a horse move a cart if they exert equal and opposite forces on each other according to Newton's third law? [duplicate]
Imagine a horse is tethered to a cart. According to Newton's third law, when the horse pulls on the cart, the cart will also pull backwards on the horse. Since the two objects are attached together, ...
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If I'm in outer space, and suddenly start accelerating, will I feel it?
If I'm in outer space, initially at rest, and every single particle in my body accelerates at the same rate in the same direction, will I feel that? My brain is fried thinking about this. There are ...
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Velocity is to speed as acceleration is to ________? [duplicate]
Vectors give both magnitude and direction, whereas scalars can be thought of as magnitude without direction. So, velocity is a vector since it is speed with direction. Similarly, what is the scalar ...
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