Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Thursday, October 16, 2008
Momentum
- when looking at collisions we want to see what factors are important in determining the outcome of the collision (what will deteremine if each objects moves one way versus the other, whether they will stop or stick together, etc)
- after observing different kinds of collisions we can see that 2 factors are important: the mass of each object and the velocity of each object.
- each of the 2 factors are not significant by themselves but taken together they give useful information in a collision.
- so we look at a quantity that incoporatate mass and velocity and we call it momentum, designated by the letter p.
p = mv (when using this formula m is in kg, v is in m/s, and p will be in kg m/s)
- after observing different kinds of collisions we can see that 2 factors are important: the mass of each object and the velocity of each object.
- each of the 2 factors are not significant by themselves but taken together they give useful information in a collision.
- so we look at a quantity that incoporatate mass and velocity and we call it momentum, designated by the letter p.
p = mv (when using this formula m is in kg, v is in m/s, and p will be in kg m/s)
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