Projectile Motion: More Geometry, More Physics

• Autores: Jan Fiala
• Localización: The Physics Teacher, ISSN 0031-921X, Vol. 62, Nº. 3, 2024, págs. 210-213
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • Imagine getting an email from the Projectile Motion lab, where Alice and Bob are testing a new launcher in one of the best vacuum chambers in the world. Bob has used the same projectile each time, and all the launcher settings have remained the same except for the launch angle. Alice captured the movement of the projectile on a high-speed camera to see what shape its trajectory was. To do this, Alice and Bob wrote program code that extracted the coordinates of the projectile from the captured images and tested which curve best matched their data. They found that each trajectory had the shape of a parabola, even though the aspect ratio was not the same in the horizontal and vertical directions. In plotting the best-fitting curves, Alice and Bob realized that the vertical direction and the horizontal direction had different scales.