can someone help??????????????????? (1 Viewer)

[poopoohead]

i need help with the dot point from space:

• Perform an investigation to help distinguish between non-inertial and inertial frames of reference

whats a good experiment for this one?

does anyone have any ideas?

thanku

 

[The Gate Keeper]

ball toss in a car. Have the car travelling at constant speed, throw the ball, and it will go up and down and land in the same spot (to the person in the car) that's inertial frame of reference.

For someone outside watching, the ball doesn't go straight up and down, it goes in a parabolic curve, that's a non-inertial frame of reference.

Good enough?

 

[alcalder]

Further to the ball toss in the car. If the car is travelling at a constant velocity or stationary (which is, to all intents and purposes also a constant velocity) then you cannot perform an experiment to determine if the frame of reference is moving or not.

If you toss the ball up it will land in your lap. Just as if you toss a ball in the air while standing on the surface of the earth. It will return to you (even though the earth is turning and moving around the sun).

NOW, if you take that same ball and you are in a car and it is accelerating. If you toss the ball up, it will hit you in the face. If the car is decelerating, the ball will hit the windscreen. If the car is turning, the ball will hit a side window. The frame of reference is changing its velocity in some way and therefore the experiment will show that the frame of reference is accelerating in some way.

Actually, I had an interesting discussion with my 10 year old son about this just on the weekend. He wanted to know why the fly in the train did not get hit by that back of the train while it was flying.

Does that help?

 

[The Gate Keeper]

LOL alcalder, that's heaps good. Yea, those are the expansion to my brief description, but very good use of imagery, so go accelerate your car and throw a ball up, watch it smack you in the face

 

[shinji]

or ucould go use the plum bob experiment

accelerate, it leans back towards u
stationary / constant velocity - it's stationary. at it's normal point.

etc.


plum bob: things u hang from ur car mirror

 

[poopoohead]

hey, thanyou for that.

i was just going thu all the first hand investigation/experiemtn thingys and i got this one- i had no idea

thanku again