Recent content by ham

I am now convinced I am wrong. However, I must go and work a few more problems like this to totally understand what is going on. Thanks to all of you. Ham

Dale, I see your point. However, given that this is a high school physics problem, I don't think the intent of the problem was to consider damping where I would agree some energy would go into the damping medium such as air friction. If we asume there is no friction, and we lowered the mass...

Doc Al. Theoritically, energy in a sping is stored and not used, like energy in a capacitor and inductor. If the mass was dropped, it should oscillate indifinately. Let's asume we don't drop the mass but lower it slowly. The change in PE would be 6.52, and the stored energy, per calculation...

Smash, I agree that that equation e = (1/2) kd^2 should be used. This is not the issue. I think the k value, or something else, is wrong in order to conserv energy.

Dale, Regardless of the objective of the problem, I think there is an error here. Please check my calculations and tell me whee I am wrong.

I think that although not specifically said, there is no wind or other resistance here. If the mass were dropped, it would oscillate as the potential energy in the spring would be transferred between kinetic energy and gravitational potential energy. At rest, there would be no kinetic energy so...

I would think of it this way...If you think that a particle at the axis of rotation has a radius (dimension), then there would be rotation. However, since the axis has no dimension or radius, it is just a line, then basically there is no particle there hence no rotation. If there were rotation...

I am a tutor. I ran across this problem is a high school physics textbook. See attachment x162, my solution is on x163. I thought that mechancical energy is conserved and that loss of potential energy should be equal to gain in elastic (stored) energy. Ithink the spring constant must be wrong?