toforfiltum said:
To confirm because I'm not too sure, the moments of these two normal forces intersect at O?
The forces being referred to are applied at A by the wall, directly to the right, and at B by the floor, straight up. So the point you want to use as the centre of rotation for torque calcs is at the intersection of a line that goes vertically up from B with a line that goes horizontally to the right from A. In other words, it's the fourth corner of a rectangle whose other three corners are A, O and B..
And if it's correct, is it true that the way to find the intersection of two moments is by finding the intersection of their two perpendicular distances, as in the diagram?
No it's the intersection of
lines of force we are finding, as described above, not the intersection of moments - which I don't think is a meaningful concept.
I don't get what your last two sentences here. If you said that by taking the method above, you will get one equation that answers the problem, why must we again find the moment due to tension?
Once we take the new point, call it X, as the centre of rotation, we can ignore the forces from the wall and the floor because their lines of action pass through X, so they exert no torque about X. The forces we are left with are:
(1) the weight W of the ladder, applied vertically downwards at the ladder's midpoint; and
(2) the tension of the string, which is easiest to handle as haruspex suggests, by considering it as being applied at O. So this is a force acting in the direction of the string, of size T, at O.
The torques about X from (1) and (2) are calculated by resolving each one into components parallel and normal to XO. Each torque is the normal component multiplied by the distance from X to the point at which it is applied. By looking at the diagram you can see that these torques act in opposite directions to one another.
For the system to be stationary, the magnitudes of the torques from (1) and (2) must be equal. Setting them equal gives us the one equation we need to solve for the one unknown T, since we are given W, ##\theta## and the angle of the ladder.
This is a far neater solution than my one. Thanks haruspex.