Recent content by mailman

ok, so now that we are on the same page, I have a couple of questions: isn't energy conservation completely due to the work energy theorem; i.e., the reason you can ignore friction is because it does no work, so you just have to deal with gravity potential and kinetic energy. It is this specific...

ok, now I'm really confused; I thought that the reason rolling friction does no work is because when you consider a point on the ground, its at rest, and as soon as it starts moving, the fore is being applied at that point, so no work is done, since work is by definition the force times the...

ok, i guess the examples made it clear. but i have one more question that's bothering me: essentially, what you have said implies that the work energy theorem holds iff we define work to be the force applied on the body at a contact point (dot product) the distance the contact point moves. So...

The way you are suggesting is T = I(alpha), F = ma method of solving the problem, and this makes a lot of sense to me. It's just that it seems that there should be a way to justify it using energy conservation besides saying that, work is simply due to the force being applied to the SAME point...

So doesn't "pseudo-work" also have to cancel? I mean, I think that pseudo-work cancels because the work done by the force on the center of mass is exactly canceled by the work done on one point as it moves around the circle: for example, consider a point instantaneously in contact, then let the...

Consider a hollow cylinder rolling down an inclined plane, without slipping. I know that the rolling friction does no work on the point which is in contact with the cylinder, since that point must be at rest since we have rolling without slipping, but isn't the ENTIRE BODY still moving, so the...