DaleSpam said:
Who said the force attaches at a right angle to the rod and is on both sides of the rod? Those weren't any of your constraints. Your constraints were that the COM followed the track and that the thin rod was perpendicular to the track at each point.
Under the constraints in the OP you get the above results. The forces from the track are whatever are needed to achieve those constraints on the motion. You cannot constrain both the motion and also the forces. Once you fix one then the other is determined.
Your suggestion was that the force of constraint changes the dynamics of the mass moving on the rail. This is impossible according to d'Alembert's principle. The force of constraint can't do any work. It just constrains. It would only be noticeable in the form of internal stress forces in the material.
DaleSpam said:
Your graphical illustration is irrelevant. For any rigid object you can always easily find generalized coordinates where the object is stationary in those coordinates.
So the fact that the plot of the generalized coordinates matches your illustration is completely uninformative. Any rigid body in any scenario undergoing any possible motion can match your illustration for some suitable choice of generalized coordinates.
You make it sound as if I had plucked the general coordinate out of thin air. It strictly relates to the physical constraint here. The rail and rigidly connected rod nail down the path of any mass element of the rod to be a curve parallel to the rail. So taking the general coordinate as the path along the rail is not only the natural thing to do here but even what you should do unless you want to get into difficulties.
DaleSpam said:
Therefore, you have to derive the expression for the KE in the generalized coordinates some other way. For this problem, I showed how in 5 and again in 33.
You have assumed a rotational degree of freedom that simply isn't there. 'Degree of freedom' means just that: the object is free to move in this dimension. But in this case it isn't because of the constraint. You can't rotate the rod without translating it. The system has only 1 degree of freedom. The rod may get rotat
ed but it is not rotat
ing. If you assume it is rota
ting you count something twice here.
DaleSpam said:
I fail to see the relevance of this new scenario to the scenario of the OP. You keep on bringing in irrelevant side issues. I don't know why.
It is not irrelevant. An elastic collision can conveniently separate the linear momentum from the rotational momentum. If you assume the rod with linear momentum p hits elastically a point mass with the same mass at rest on the rail, the conservation laws for the linear momentum and kinetic energy require that
after the collision
1) the point mass has linear momentum p
2) the rod has linear momentum 0
But because the orientation of the rod is constrained to its linear motion, 2) implies also
3) the rod has intrinsic angular momentum 0
So since the total energy is p^2/2m after the collision, energy conservation requires that it is also p^2/2m before the collision, i.e. there was no intrinsic rotational energy of the rod present in the first place.