Class 1, Thursday, September 1, 2016

Reading: 2.1 Étienne-Jules Marey

Today we are starting a series of a few lectures dealing with the part of mechanics called
kinematics. The word stems from the Greek kinein, which means to move. Kinematics is
concerned with how objects move without regards for the cause of the motion. For this
purpose, objects can be reduced to particles, i.e. we are not interested in the details of the
object’s shape or composition and can therefore pretend that its mass is concentrated in
one point. We will later relax this assumption.

Analyzing Linear Motion

In 1638, very near the end of his life, Galileo Galilei published “Discourses on Two New
Sciences”, which contained work he had done 30 years earlier. The book is structured in
the form of a dialogue between three arguing people, and it spans four days, each
dedicated to a different topic. The third day revolves around the motion of objects in free-
fall. Doubtlessly, this work laid the foundation of the science of Mechanics, emerging
from logic and mathematics and backed up through careful experimentation.

How do we describe the motion of a falling object? Verifying the Law of Free Fall with
present means appears, at first glance, to be a trivial task and without further thought, the
painstaking work that went into verifying its validity in the 17th century, could easily be
obscured. To do justice to it, imagine that Galileo pushed the limits of the available
instrumentation at his time much in the same way as the team that made the landing and
operation of he Curiosity rover on Mars possible.

We will use the classical example of a falling object to illustrate a few basic principles
that will allow us to expand our knowledge to the motion in three-dimensional space. All
ideas presented here apply, of course, to any one-dimensional motion, whether along the
horizontal or vertical direction.

You could start by measuring the distance with respect to the ground of the object at
equal time intervals. This establishes our coordinate system, the y-axis, and you are free
to pick its origin wherever you wish. Here, it is convenient to choose y=0 to be the
ground, if we want the positive y-direction to be upward. The location of the object can
then be reported as a y-coordinate, measured, for instance, in meters or in feet.
Alternately, if we want to indicate
 direction, i.e. the ball is above or below the origin, we
could use a position vector, r , which connects the origin of the coordinate axis with the
current location of the object. Since the object is moving, both the y-coordinate and the
position vector are functions of time:
€ ! !
y = y(t) r = r (t)

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 !
Note that in 3D, we will use the symbol r for the position vector, but when the motion
! !
takes place in one dimension, I will use y or x depending on whether the object is
moving vertically or horizontally.

As the object moved from an initial point, A, to a final point, B, we can calculate the
displacement vector as the difference between the final and initial position vectors. The
distance traveled is the difference between the y-coordinates of the two points, A and B.
In this simple example, the distance traveled is the same as the magnitude of the
displacement vector. You will see in a later example, that this may not always be the
case!
! ! ! ! !
Δr = rfinal − rinitial = rB − rA
!
Δr = yB − yA = distance traveled

When we study motion in one dimension, the position vector and the displacement vector
depend only on one coordinate (in our case, the y-coordinate, because this is the direction
along which the motion takes place). Both these vectors can be positive or negative. For
example, for the falling object, the position vectors of any two points, A and B, are
positive as the object falls from point A to point B. The displacement vector, however, is
negative. What are the position vectors and the displacement vector for this object if we
reverse its motion, such as would be the case if we threw the object up? Do they change
with respect to the previous situation? We illustrate the situation below.

Fig 1

(a) Objects descends (b) Object asscends (c) Changing the origin

As you can see, the position vectors didn’t change. The object, while moving in the
opposite direction, is still moving between the same two points, and we did not change
the origin of the coordinate system. The displacement vector, however, did change. It
now points in the opposite direction. It is positive, indicating that the object is moving
“upward” with respect to the origin. Its magnitude is the same as in the previous example.
We can work this out mathematically as well.

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        
ΔrBA = rfinal − rinit = rA − rB = −(rB − rA ) = −ΔrAB

Notice that the displacement vector does not depend on the choice of the origin of our
coordinate axis. Let’s assume that we moved the origin by a given amount, a, upward of
its original location. This shortens the initial and final position vectors by the same
amount, and so the difference between them remains unchanged. You can see this
graphically in Fig. 1c above.

Formally, this fact is easy to show:

  
rA' = rA − a
  
rB' = rB − a
             
Δr ' = rB' − rA' = rB − a − (rA − a) = rB − a − rA + a = rB − rA = Δr

Let’s now return to our original question of analyzing the free fall motion. In momentary
disregard of Galileo’s method to measure equal intervals of time and the corresponding
positions, we will assume that we can easily do it today, which will allow us to graph the
object’s position as a function of time. The following photograph was assembled by
lining up a burst of snapshots of a falling ball taken with the iPhone. The time interval
between any two consecutive frames is the same. This sequence will allow us to
characterize the motion. How would you describe it?

Fig 2.

Clearly, the ball is moving more slowly at first, and, aside from the last frame, it falls
through increasingly larger heights each time interval, Δt . This means that the ball’s
speed is not constant. When an object’s speed or velocity is changing, the object is said to
accelerate. This leads us to a few basic definitions, which are introduced in the next
section, but in order to be able to quantify the motion, we should measure the distances
for each time interval. We could use bricks as our distance unit, and the unknown time
unit at which the iPhone takes a burst of photos. My table below, however, contains a set
of measurements I might have made in order to describe the free fall. I will be using these
numbers instead. The second column indicates the time elapsed since the start of the

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motion. Just as in Galileo’s original experiments, these are equal time intervals. The third
column represented the height with respect to the ground. The ball starts at y0=10m. The
last measurement is just 0.4m above the ground. In the fourth column I recorded the
distance intervals between any pair of consecutive measurements, so they correspond to
equal time intervals. Finally, the fifth column indicates the distance from the start for
each measurement. In agreement with the photographic rendering on the previous page,
the motion is not uniform, i.e. equal time intervals do not correspond to equal distances
traveled. For now, we ignore the remaining entries in the table, but note that we could
represent the time in arbitrary time units. For instance, Galileo might have used the beat
of the pulse, a pendulum swing, or a water clock to make such measurements of equal
time entities. Our Time Unit is TU=0.2s.

!
i t(s) y(m) Δy = yi − yi+1 y0 − yi yi − yi+1 y0 − yi v (m/s)
vi ( m / s ) = vt =
Δt ti − t 0
0 0 10 0 0 0 0 0
1 0.2 9.80 0.2 0.2 1 1 -1.96
2 0.4 9.22 0.58 0.78 2.9 1.95 -3.92
3 0.6 8.24 0.98 1.76 4.9 2.93 -5.88
4 0.8 6.86 1.38 3.14 6.9 3.93 -7.84
5 1.0 5.10 1.76 4.90 8.8 4.9 -9.80
6 1.2 2.94 2.16 7.06 10.8 5.88 -11.76
7 1.4 0.40 2.54 9.6 12.7 6.86 -13.72

Table 1. Positions and time for a free-falling object.

The data represented in the fourth and fifth column of the table show the continuous
increase in the distance, but how exactly does this happen, if it is not linear in time? A
good next guess would be a quadratic dependence. In lecture, we verified that when
y0 − yi , i.e. the total distance traveled within i time units, is divided by the time it takes to
fall through that distance, we obtain, within rounding errors, the same number, around
4.9. We recognize this as half of the gravitational acceleration on the Earth’s surface, g,
but Galileo did not have the means to determine g. He summarized this result in his
“Dialogue on the two New Sciences” as: “I prove the spaces passed … to be in the
squared ratios of the times”. The so-called “position graph” in Fig. 3 shows this
dependence as reflected by our numbers.

What does a chord connecting two points on the y(t) graph represent? What about the
tangent at any given point?

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 Fig. 3

Average and Instantaneous Speed and Velocity

Both the chord connecting two points on the graph and the tangent to the y(t) or x(t)
graph at any point have speed units. The former represent the average speed, defined as
the distance traveled divided by the corresponding time interval (note that we will use a
bar over the given quantity whenever we indicate that we represent an average). The
average speed for the first time interval in Table 1 is 1m/s.

Δy distance traveled 10m − 9.8m

v= = v= = 1m / s
Δt time interval 0.2s

On the other hand, the average velocity on that same time interval is the displacement
divided by the time interval. It is a vector, indicating not only how fast the object is
moving, on average, but also in which direction (here downward, so according to our
convention, this is a negative velocity, because, as established earlier, the displacement,
is negative):

! Δr! Δy! ! !
v= = here v < 0 because Δy < 0.
Δt Δt

The tangent to the y(t) graph represents the instantaneous speed, and if we consider that
the line can be positively or negatively sloped, including this information, we obtain the
instantaneous velocity,
!
! dy
v= .
dt

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 Fig. 4

a. Average Speed: b. Move 2 closer to 1 c. Instantaneous Speed:

become
small. 2 converges slope of tangent at point
toward 1.

Example 1. What are the average speed and average velocity when the ball is thrown
upwards from a height of 0.4 m above the ground and returns to that same height, for (i)
the ascent, (ii) the descent, and (iii) the total trip up and back?

The ball’s motion upward is merely a rewind of the fall which is recorded in table 1. The
average speed on each leg as well as on the entire trip does not change whether the ball is
ascending or descending. The 5th column in the table indicates the average speed on each
equal time interval.

(10 − 0.4)m
v= = 6.86m / s
1.4s

The average velocity, however, is +6.86m/s on the ascent leg and -6.86m/s on the
descent. The net average speed for both legs, still is 6.86m/s, because the object spends
the same amount of time on both legs. You will see how this changes when the two legs
no longer correspond to equal time intervals. The average velocity is 0, because the
object returns to the same position as it started at, and hence, the displacement for the
total trip is 0.
!
! Δr 0.4m − 0.4m
v= = = 0.
Δt 2 ⋅1.4s

Velocity-Time Graphs - Acceleration

Aside from deriving the correct relation between time and position for a falling object,
Galileo also worked out how the speed ought to change for this type of motion: “it picks
up equal amounts of speed in equal time intervals, so that, if it falls from rest, it is moving
twice as fast after two seconds as it was moving after one second, and moving three times
as fast after three seconds as it was after one second.”

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 In other words, for a free-falling object, the speed increases linearly with time. The last
column in table 1 shows this in a faintly disguised form. In fact, if you look at the 7th
column, where the average speed has been recorded over 1, 2, 3, and so on, time units
from the start, you will notice that the average speed over such intervals is almost exactly
the same as half of the instantaneous speed at the end of the interval. This is related to
how Galileo reasoned about the speed-time dependence in the free-fall motion. The graph
below shows the velocity as a function of time for our free-falling object. What does the
slope of this line constitute?

Fig. 5

The instantaneous acceleration is the limit of the average acceleration for infinitesimally
small time intervals:

 dv
a=
dt

m/s m
In the SI system of units, the acceleration is measured in = 2.
€ s s
Geometrically, we can represent the average speed as the slope of the chord connecting
the two points on the velocity-time curve. The tangent to the curve at the given point is
the instantaneous acceleration.

Fig 6.

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Thus, in contrast to the velocity, which describes an object’s speed and direction of
motion at any time, the acceleration describes how the speed and the direction of motion
change in time.

In the free fall motion we analyzed, the velocity is a linear function of time. This suggests
that the acceleration is constant in time.