Physics I For Dummies. Steven Holzner

Anything that has both size and direction is best described with a vector. Vectors are often represented as arrows, where the length of the arrow tells you the magnitude (size), and the direction of the arrow tells you the direction. For a velocity vector, the length corresponds to the speed of the object, and the arrow points in the direction the object is moving. (To find out how to use vectors, head to Chapter 4.)

Everything has a velocity, so velocity is great for describing the world around you. Even if an object is at rest with respect to the ground, it’s still on the Earth, which itself has a velocity. (And if everything has a velocity, it’s no wonder physicists keep getting grant money — somebody has to measure all that motion.)

      If you’ve ever ridden in a car, you know that velocity isn’t the end of the story. Cars don’t start off at 60 miles per hour; they have to accelerate until they get to that speed. Like velocity, acceleration has not only a magnitude but also a direction, so acceleration is a vector in physics as well. We cover speed, velocity, and acceleration in Chapter 4.

      Round and round: Rotational motion

      Plenty of things go round and round in the everyday world — figure skaters, tires, pitchers’ arms, clothes in a dryer, roller coasters doing the loop, or just little kids spinning from joy in their first snowstorm. That being the case, physicists want to get in on the action with measurements. Just as you can have a car moving and accelerating in a straight line, its tires can rotate and accelerate in a circle.

      Going from the linear world to the rotational world turns out to be easy, because there’s a handy physics analog (which is a fancy word for “equivalent”) for everything linear in the rotational world. For example, distance traveled becomes angle turned. Speed in meters per second becomes angular speed in angle turned per second. Even linear acceleration becomes rotational acceleration.

      So when you know linear motion, rotational motion just falls in your lap. You use the same equations for both linear and angular motion — just different symbols with slightly different meanings (angle replaces distance, for example). You’ll be looping the loop in no time. Chapter 7 has the details.

      Springs and pendulums: Simple harmonic motion

      Have you ever watched something bouncing up and down on a spring? That kind of motion puzzled physicists for a long time, but then they got down to work. They discovered that when you stretch a spring, the force isn’t constant. The spring pulls back, and the more you pull the spring, the stronger it pulls back.

      So how does the force compare to the distance you pull a spring? The force is directly proportional to the amount you stretch the spring: Double the amount you stretch the spring, and you double the amount of force with which the spring pulls back.

Physicists were overjoyed — this was the kind of math they understood. Force proportional to distance? Great — you can put that relationship into an equation, and you can use that equation to describe the motion of the object tied to the spring. Physicists got results telling them just how objects tied to springs would move — another triumph of physics.

      This particular triumph is called simple harmonic motion. It’s simple because force is directly proportional to distance, and so the result is simple. It’s harmonic because it repeats over and over again as the object on the spring bounces up and down. Physicists were able to derive simple equations that could tell you exactly where the object would be at any given time.

      But that’s not all. Simple harmonic motion applies to many objects in the real world, not just things on springs. For example, pendulums also move in simple harmonic motion. Say you have a stone that’s swinging back and forth on a string. As long as the arc it swings through isn’t too high, the stone on a string is a pendulum; therefore, it follows simple harmonic motion. If you know how long the string is and how big of an angle the swing covers, you can predict where the stone will be at any time. We discuss simple harmonic motion in Chapter 13.

When Push Comes to Shove: Forces

      Forces are a particular favorite in physics. You need forces to get motionless things moving — literally. Consider a stone on the ground. Many physicists (except, perhaps, geophysicists) would regard it suspiciously. It’s just sitting there. What fun is that? What can you measure about that? After physicists had measured its size and mass, they’d lose interest.

      But kick the stone — that is, apply a force — and watch the physicists come running over. Now something is happening — the stone started at rest, but now it’s moving. You can find all kinds of numbers associated with this motion. For instance, you can connect the force you apply to something to its mass and get its acceleration. And physicists love numbers, because numbers help describe what’s happening in the physical world.

      Physicists are experts in applying forces to objects and predicting the results. Got a refrigerator to push up a ramp and want to know if it’ll go? Ask a physicist. Have a rocket to launch? Same thing.

      Absorbing the energy around you

      You don’t have to look far to find your next piece of physics. (You never do.) As you exit your house in the morning, for example, you may hear a crash up the street. Two cars have collided at a high speed, and locked together, they’re sliding your way. Thanks to physics (and more specifically, Part 3 of this book), you can make the necessary measurements and predictions to know exactly how far you have to move to get out of the way.

      Having mastered the ideas of energy and momentum helps at such a time. You use these ideas to describe the motion of objects with mass. The energy of motion is called kinetic energy, and when you accelerate a car from 0 to 60 miles per hour in 10 seconds, the car ends up with plenty of kinetic energy.

      Where does the kinetic energy come from? It comes from work, which is what happens when a force moves an object through a distance. The energy can also come from potential energy, the energy stored in the object, which comes from the work done by a particular kind of force, such as gravity or electrical forces. Using gasoline, for example, an engine does work on the car to get it up to speed. But you need a force to accelerate something, and the way the engine does work on the car, surprisingly, is to use the force of friction with the road. Without friction, the wheels would simply spin, but because of a frictional force, the tires impart a force on the road. For every force between two objects, there is a reactive force of equal size but in the opposite direction. So the road also exerts a force on the car, which causes it to accelerate.

      Or say that you’re moving a piano up the stairs of your new place. After you move up the stairs, your piano has potential energy, simply because you put in a lot of work against gravity to get the piano up those six floors. Unfortunately, your roommate hates pianos and drops yours out the window. What happens next? The potential energy of the piano due to its height in a gravitational field is converted into kinetic energy, the energy of motion. You decide to calculate the final speed of the piano as it hits the street. (Next, you calculate the bill for the piano, hand it to your roommate, and go back downstairs to get your drum set.)

      That’s heavy: Pressures in fluids

      Ever notice that when you’re 5,000 feet down in the ocean, the pressure is different from at the surface? Never been 5,000 feet beneath the ocean waves? Then you may have noticed the difference in pressure when you dive into a swimming pool. The deeper you go, the higher the pressure is because of the weight of the water above you exerting a force downward. Pressure is just force per area.