- #1
titaniumpen
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As far as I know, you can't prove laws, but anyway...
We got to do an experiment at school. A weight is suspended vertically from a string which is connected to a trolley which is placed horizontally on a flat table. There's a pulley at the edge of the table to reduce friction. Then we let the weight fall due to gravity and pull the trolley across the table. The trolley pulls along a tape as it moves, and the tape has to go through a ticker timer, which automatically dots the tape every 0.2 second.
The set up looks like this:
http://www.mathsrevision.net/alevel/pure/using%20Newton.JPG
Anyway, we studied the tape and tried to measure the acceleration. We know the force exerted by the falling weight, and we also know the acceleration of the trolley from the tape. We also know the mass of the trolley. So if we put the values into F=ma, which is Newton's Second Law of Motion, we should find that both sides of the equation is the same. Which proves that Newton's Second Law is true!
Now, I don't think you can prove the Second Law like that. How do we know the force exerted by the falling weight on the trolley? The force is mg, right? (m=mass of weight, g=9.81m/s^2) But that is determined using Newton's Second Law. We cannot prove a law by using the law itself. Isn't that a circular argument?
Thanks for reading, this got me thinking for some time...
We got to do an experiment at school. A weight is suspended vertically from a string which is connected to a trolley which is placed horizontally on a flat table. There's a pulley at the edge of the table to reduce friction. Then we let the weight fall due to gravity and pull the trolley across the table. The trolley pulls along a tape as it moves, and the tape has to go through a ticker timer, which automatically dots the tape every 0.2 second.
The set up looks like this:
http://www.mathsrevision.net/alevel/pure/using%20Newton.JPG
Anyway, we studied the tape and tried to measure the acceleration. We know the force exerted by the falling weight, and we also know the acceleration of the trolley from the tape. We also know the mass of the trolley. So if we put the values into F=ma, which is Newton's Second Law of Motion, we should find that both sides of the equation is the same. Which proves that Newton's Second Law is true!
Now, I don't think you can prove the Second Law like that. How do we know the force exerted by the falling weight on the trolley? The force is mg, right? (m=mass of weight, g=9.81m/s^2) But that is determined using Newton's Second Law. We cannot prove a law by using the law itself. Isn't that a circular argument?
Thanks for reading, this got me thinking for some time...
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