Recent content by MattGeo

what exactly did you mean when you said "to get displacement x and X = x+z-l as for position not displacement" ?

I've become extremely dense in time. I am at a complete dead end. I really want to learn how to solve this problem step by step because I think it is an excellent problem which encapsulates a lot of interesting physics concepts with some complicated behavior, despite the seemingly simple setup...

the acceleration of the CoM is simply the applied external force divided by total mass of system. If I am in the CoM frame I am accelerating alongside it and it remains at rest with respect to me. I can't figure out how I would get the relative motion of the 2 masses with respect to CoM though...

rustier than I thought. The differential equation immediately made sense to me. I just can't solve it because I don't remember anything from diff eq. It seems 2nd order linear and non-homogeneous but we can't integrate with respect to t. I assume I have to apply one of the standard techniques...

great, thanks!! something as simple as you setting that up went a long way in dusting off all the cobwebs.

I honestly don't think I can figure this out without further assistance and insight. It's been quite a long time since I took an advanced classical mechanics course. I just enjoy thinking about physics and made up this problem. Could you please prompt me with any further hints or important...

[Mentors’ note: No template because this post was moved from the technical forums. Everything that the template asks for seems to be present in the body of the post] Suppose there is a spring-mass system arranged as shown in my crude drawing. This occurs on a frictionless surface. The spring...

Do you mean by just calculating the impulse starting at the collision instant and incorporating both masses since they're effectively a single mass at that point?

I am not sure why it never occurred to me before despite actually having taken an advanced classical mechanics course in college, but how do we treat a collision where the objects involved are actually accelerating? In the case where colliding objects move at constant velocity it is standard...

I wanted to bring up the deformation and elasticity because isn't it necessary anyway for the interaction? We treat objects as rigid but if they actually were fully rigid wouldn't that prevent the Coulombic interaction as they encroach on each other? There's a nonzero interaction in the EM...

So say that two objects collide in an elastic collision. They have different masses and are made of different materials. Upon collision they each deform to some extent and store elastic energy before rebounding. Being that they are different materials with different molecular lattices I imagine...

I spend a lot of time thinking about collision problems because for me they are both extremely interesting and often very difficult to grasp when one thinks about them beyond the basics we are taught in introductory or even intermediate university courses. Suppose there is a perfectly elastic...

If I accelerated by using the excellent first and then I apply the same force to the surface after already moving, how could the energy be the same as having just pushed off the surface first with the same force. I guess it's conceptually a stumbling block in the first place that prevents me...

I don't really understand why the first mechanism results in a fixed increase in KE and the second mechanism results in a fixed acceleration. Could you elaborate on that? How are they "fixed" and how are they different?

So I was wondering something new after this problem that you elucidated for me finally clicked. How is this situation related to (or unrelated to) the Oberth Effect? Like suppose a car were traveling in a situation where there was zero air resistance and we could safely ignore internal...