Physics – Physics Education
Scientific paper
2011-08-09
Physics
Physics Education
14 pages, 9 figures
Scientific paper
As we typically teach in an introductory mechanics course, choosing a "good" reference frame with convenient axes may present a major simplification to a problem. Additionally, knowing some conserved quantities provides an extremely powerful problem-solving tool. While the former idea is typically discussed in the context of Newton's Laws, the latter starts with introducing conservation of energy even later. This work presents an elegant example of implementing both aforementioned ideas in the kinematical context, thus providing a "warm-up" introduction to the standard tools used later on in dynamics. Both the choice of the (non-orthogonal) reference frame and the conserved quantities are rather non-standard, yet at the same time quite intuitive to the problem at hand. Two such problems are discussed in detail with two alternative approaches. The first approach does not even require knowledge of calculus. In the appendix, I also present the brute-force solution involving a coupled system of differential equations. In addition, a few exercises and another similar problem for students' "homework" are provided at the end.
No associations
LandOfFree
Non-Cartesian Thinking does not yet have a rating. At this time, there are no reviews or comments for this scientific paper.
If you have personal experience with Non-Cartesian Thinking, we encourage you to share that experience with our LandOfFree.com community. Your opinion is very important and Non-Cartesian Thinking will most certainly appreciate the feedback.
Profile ID: LFWR-SCP-O-70751