Thursday, June 14, 2012

Unit 2 Kinematics

In Unit 2 we learned about kinematics or the study of motion. All motion is relative, and is dependent on an objects relativity to another object. Everything has a relative position, meaning if one object is moving they are actually both moving. When you drive past a house you are moving away from the house at the same speed as the house is moving away from you. This was a really mind blowing realization that I thought was really interesting. We also learned loads of new vocabulary such as scalar and vector qualities, speed, position, acceleration, and velocity. A lot of the concepts we learned about had something to do with distance (how far) and displacement (distance with direction). We also learned graphing rules for two different kinds of graphs, a position vs. time graph and a velocity vs. time graph.


This is a picture I took when in Kyoto Station in Japan. I thought it was crazy how employees walked around vacuuming the floors during the day. I thought this was a good example of kinematics because as I moved away from the woman she moved away from me at the exact same speed. One of the concepts we learned in Unit 2!

2 comments:

  1. I really liked your blog post Kai! I also learned a lot of very new concepts during class, for example I did not know that velocity and speed were different! Just like you I also had a realization that motion is relative. I really like the way you put it in terms of a car and a house, how the car is not the only thing moving but in fact relative to each other they are both moving.! good post!

    ReplyDelete
  2. That is so weird that they vacuum the floors during the day! That's a good idea since one of the first things we learned in kinematics was that you're probably moving at the same speed away from each other, but it just seems faster. :)nice picture!

    ReplyDelete