Sunday, September 7, 2008

Displacement, Velocity, and Acceleration



In these two photos, my friend Katie and I are running up a slight incline for a relay in Maui. As you can see, we have both positive displacement and velocity, as displacement is calcuated by finding the shortest path between the initial and final position of an object's motion (and taking into account the direction the object is traveling), and velocity is calculated by dividing the object's displacement by how fast it takes to move to that displacement. Since the displacement was positive, the velocity was also positive. Although our displacement and velocities were both positive, and we're traveling in a forward motion, we actually have negative acceleration, because we're slowing down as we're going forward. Acceleration is the change in instantaneous velocity dividided by elapsed time. Since our velocities in the second picture are lower than our velocities in the first picture, our accelerations are negative. However, if Katie and I happened to have been in better shape for the relay, we would have actually had positive acceleration and ran faster while going up the hill.
Another example of displacement, velocity, and acceleration in these two photos is the car that can be seen in the very back of the first photo and is the second car in the second photo. Its displacement and velocity are both positive, and one can easily see this by looking at its distance relative to the truck that was second to the last in the first photo and first in the second photo. The car also obviously has positive acceleration because of how quickly it moves from its position from way behind in the background of the first picture, to almost right behind the truck in the second picture.
Although Katie and I were slowing down while going up the hill, we must not have been going that slowly because the lady wearing the yellow remains behind us in the second picture. Perhaps she had the exact same negative acceleration!

6 comments:

GTTLGY said...

hello,
all that running looked hard. didn't you get tired after?
grant

jus said...

yea erin, looks exhausting, you must have just been famished after that.

gavin said...

haha run erin!!!
bwahaha
kay good connection
that test was HARd

Lori said...

hey,
i like the pictures you took.
I really liked your explanation of acceleration. That's cool you got to do a race in Maui.

jcarlile09 said...

eh braddah

Erika said...

hahaha..ahahaha...i didn't believe kt...ha now i do...nice physics....