Formula One Racing: Classical Mechanics Inroduction

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CLASSICAL MECHANICS

INRODUCTION
 Formula One Racing
For as long as cars have been around, people have been racing them. We
begin our classical mechanics training to the thunderous sound of
engines.

In this quiz, you will have a front seat at one of the world's premier auto
races: the Monaco Grand Prix, a renowned race on the hilly streets of
Monte Carlo.

A modern Formula One racecar is a conglomeration of precisely


machined moving parts. Classical mechanics is a framework for
unraveling the forces at work in a wide class of mechanical systems, and
the design of a Formula One racecar is a microcosm for this interplay of
forces and dynamics. The uniformity of these rules across systems and
scales makes engineering new machines possible and provides a
systematic path toward optimizing them.

In classical mechanics, you'll add these rules to your toolbox and apply
them to a vast array of machines and systems. For example, by the end
of this quiz, you'll be able to explain why Formula One cars can take
sharp turns much faster than ordinary automobiles without skidding off
the road.

You are on the pit crew of an esteemed race team, and you are making a
final check of the vehicle as it starts the warm-up lap before the race
starts.

Few components of a racecar are more important than the tires. The
driver steers the car onto the circuit as you carefully watch the tires
rotate in case any adjustments are needed.

When the car is moving forward, in which direction do the wheels turn?

Explanation
Correct answer: B
The wheels generally roll along the ground, unless the tire is slipping on
the road.
Imagine you are the driver sitting in the car, and the car is moving
forward. If you looked down at the ground, from your point of view, it
appears to be moving backward. Thus, as long as the tires are rolling on
the ground, the point on one of your tires that makes contact with the
road is moving in the same direction—backward with the road.

Classical mechanics is focused on interactions and their consequences.


For example, the tires and the road surface mutually push on each other.
In other words, they interact. Specifically, the road surface provides
some resistance to the spinning tires called friction that
pushes against the tires.

As long as the contact — or "grip" — between the tires and the road
surface is strong, the force of friction acting on the tire propels the car
forward.

What happens if the tires did not make an adequate grip on the road?


Select all possible answers.
Explanation :
Correct answer: The wheels would spin, but the car won't accelerate
as efficiently, and Turning the car would be difficult
The control and handling of the car depends on the force of friction
between the surface and the tires. Unless the car's tires make sufficiently
strong contact with the road surface, this force cannot act.
Without grip, regardless of how fast the tires spin, the car will move in
one direction. If you try to turn the steering wheel, it will not respond.
Nowhere is this more clear than on a snowy, icy, or wet road. If the tires
cannot get a grip, you are not able to control the vehicle.

The friction between the tire and the road is actually the force that
propels the car forward. Cars are traditionally powered by an internal

The hairpin turns of the Circuit de Monaco are where the tires' grip


really counts. During the warm-up lap, your team’s driver is
approaching Turn 6, a hairpin bend around 180^\circ180∘ infamous for
dashing the chances of a Monaco Grand Prix victory for many skilled
drivers over the decades.

Your team's driver takes the turn at a constant speed. Which direction
does the force of friction act on the tires to keep the car on its trajectory
around the curve?

Explanation
Correct answer: B
To travel around a curve requires an inward force toward the center of
the circular arc.
Friction on the tires not only keeps the car moving around the curve but
also provides the center-directed force. A vehicle skids off a curve
(possibly causing a wreck) when the tires lose grip on the road. Later in
this course, we’ll learn about centripetal forces that keep an object on a
circular trajectory.

We've seen that in racing, friction is important—it's literally the driving


force that lets your team's driver direct the car. But at race speeds, other
forces compete with friction to influence the car's motion.

One such force is air drag, a resistive force acting against the car's
forward motion. Air drag is the force of air hitting the vehicle, pushing
against its forward motion.

Intuitively, two forces add or subtract depending on whether they push


in the same or opposite directions. If you've ever pushed a piece of
heavy furniture, you know it's easier when you put it on wheels first,
which reduces friction pushing against you. With this in mind, which
requires more work from the engine: accelerating from 0km/h to
50km/h, or accelerating from 50km/h to 100km/h?

Assume acceleration is constant.
Sometimes the laws of physics are portrayed as a set of limitations that
the inventions of our imaginations must abide by—as if obeying these
laws is somehow the cost of existing in the physical universe.

In fact, the converse is much closer to the truth. The principles of


physics you will learn in this course will let you, like many other
scientists and engineers, unlock the hidden potential of matter and
energy around you. As evidence, remember the Formula One car.
Understanding how air flows around the vehicle led directly to the wing
designs that stabilize the vehicle around turns by producing additional
downforce.

In this quiz, we've entirely ignored the forces internal to the vehicle (for
example, the torque on the driveshaft, axles and various gears). We've
looked instead at some of the external forces: friction, air drag, and
"grip" which later in this course we will call normal force or normal
reaction. We'll go much deeper in later chapters, but in the next quiz,
we'll look at some broad features of all physical theories.
 Cellular Automaton

In Classical Mechanics, you're going to learn how to predict the motion of


classical systems like springs, rockets, and helicopters by thinking in terms of
force and energy. But physics is more than an accounting system for forces
that predicts how objects move.

At a deeper level, it is an optimistic belief that there are rules that take


systems from one moment to the next, and a way of thinking that helps us find
these rules.

A "glider" in the 2-dimensional cellular automata called Conway's


Game of Life

In this quiz, we're going to look at systems called cellular


automata that live and die according to simple rules on a lattice. By
looking at these toy systems, we will form a clear picture of what the
machinery of classical mechanics does and how it is able to describe so
much of the world around us.

An important part of physics is deciding what information to keep track


of and what to ignore. Consider, for example, air drag on a car. Billions
of individual air molecules collide with a car's surface to produce a drag
force, but modeling every collision would be mathematically
overwhelming, even with the help of a modern computer.
The art of physics is distilling the essential qualities of a complex system
into a simpler model without sacrificing predictive accuracy. Many of
physics' most famous spokespersons have described this model-building
process, but no one advocated for this doctrine as strongly as physicist
Richard Feynman:

"Others... make guesses that are very complicated, and it sort of looks
as if it is all right, but I know it is not true because the truth always
turns out to be simpler than you thought."

In other words, no amount of calculation or mathematical sophistication


is stand-in for developing physical intuition. In this course, we uphold
Feynman's ideal as the light to guide us on our path.
Each time step, a square updates its color using the
Update Rule according to the current state of its trio.
Cellular automata are a type of system that takes Feynman's doctrine to
the extreme, unfolding in time according to a set of update rules that
can be listed on a table. Each colored square simply looks at itself and
each of its neighbors, and uses the information on the table to update its
color. For simplicity, we're going to stick with 1-dimensional
automatons where each square has two neighbors.

We call each square, plus its two neighbors, a trio. If we want to define
a "physics" for a cellular automaton, we need an update rule for each
possible trio. For example, if a square's trio were {■,■,■} it would
update to ■ according to the update rules in the diagram.

How many possible trios are there?

Explanation
Correct answer: 8 possibilities
Remember, a trio consists of a square and its two next door neighbors.
Each of the three can be either green or black, making for 2 possibilities
per square.

The total number of possible trios is simply the product of the number of
possibilities for each square:

.Ntrios = 2 × 2 × 2 = 8.
Once the update rule is complete with an entry for all possible trios, the
dynamics of a cellular automaton are nearly unambiguous.

The last thing required is the starting color of each square. In physics,
this is known as the initial state of a system. With an update rule and an
initial state in hand, we have everything we need to predict any future
state—the color of each square in our cellular automata.

Suppose the initial state of our system is a single green square:

What color will the green square be at the next time step using the
update rule below?

Explanation
Correct answer: ■
The update rule contains the information that determines the color of the
green square at the next time step. All we need to do is form a trio from
the green square and its two neighbors:

According to the update rule,

the green square in the trio {■,■,■} updates to ■.


The dynamics of a cellular automaton are fully specified by its initial
state and an update rule, which encodes the state of any square one step
into the future.

Nothing stops us from applying the update rule repeatedly to determine


the state of the automaton at much later times. We can even string
together all the states into a movie of the dynamics.

Can you figure out which of the movies below shows a cellular
automaton that's following this update rule that we used in the previous
question?

Note: the initial state of the three cellular automata below is all squares
black, except for the middle square which is green.

Explanation
Correct answer: Movie C
We can do this one of several ways.

There's always the brute force option of faithfully applying the rules to
each square in each frame and recording what we see. But this doesn't
give us any insight into what's happening.

Instead, let's try to inspect the properties of the update rule and reason
our way to the answer.
Can a second green square appear?

First, we could ask whether or not it is possible for a second green


square to appear in the cellular automata. For this to be possible, there'd
have to be a trio with one or fewer green squares that results in flipping a
black square to a green square. Looking at the update rule, we find
exactly one such trio:

So, the black square to the left of the green square would turn green and
is the only way for a black square to turn green but what happens to the
original green square? Its trio is {■,■,■}, and looking at the update rule,
this square will become black in the next time step.

This proves that there's no possibility for a second green square to


appear in the system — we'll always have one. So, goodbye Movie B.

What can one green square do?

Because the number of green squares is conserved, we can ignore all


trios in the update rule with more than one green square, since they'll
never apply.We're left with:

From here we can just follow the path of the green square through the
two remaining moves. If the green square is to the right of a black
square, then it moves to the left and the square it was on previously,
turns black.
The magic of cellular automata is that the update rule reflects all the
information we know about the system, as well as any assumptions
we've made about it. What's more is that the update rule encodes all the
possible motions in the system.

But are there such update rules in "real" physics? Consider Newton's law
of motion. It tells us that force is equal to mass times acceleration, F = m
a.F=ma. Is this an update rule that connects two states of a system?
Remember that acceleration is simply the change in velocity divided by
the change in time: a = \Delta v / \Delta t.a=Δv/Δt. Taking this into
account, Newton's law becomes\boxed{v_\text{final} = v_\text{initial}
+ \dfrac{F\Delta t}{m}},vfinal=vinitial+mFΔt,a simple update rule!
Reduced to its essence, classical mechanics is a two-fold endeavor:
understanding the lessons this update rule contains about the natural
world, and learning to solve it for the forces we find in nature.

There is one caveat that we glossed over. In nature it seems that time and
space aren't discrete like they are in cellular automata, they're
continuous. This means we have to make the timestep \Delta
tΔt infinitesimally small, which changes the discrete update rule into
a differential equation:m\frac{dv}{dt} = F.mdtdv=F.
 HUYGENS' CLOCK PUZZLE

For hundreds of years, Huygens’s pendulum clock was the world’s most
precise timekeeper. But why was his invention so effective at keeping
time?

We will learn later in this course that a pendulum is an example of


a harmonic oscillator—a simple pattern of motion that is everywhere
you look in nature, from atomic vibrations to cosmic radiation.

When you set a pendulum into motion, the time it takes to move back
and forth is called its period of oscillation. Use the visualization below
to release the pendulum from different heights.

How does the pendulum's period change as you increase the release


height?

Explanation
Correct answer: It hardly changes at all
In fact, the period of the pendulum barely changes at all in its first three
decimal places over the range of allowed release angles. A harmonic
oscillator's period is nearly independent of the height you release it from.
In the Springs chapter, we will see that this is only true for small angles
—less than 10o

This property is ideal for timekeeping because you don't need to release
the pendulum from a very specific position to have it keep the correct
time.
Similar to the cellular automata you encountered earlier, an update rule
generates the speed and position of the pendulum at any moment. This
update rule is expressed as a differential equation called the equation of
motion.

In this course, we will mostly skirt the prickly business of solving


differential equations. In this quiz, the visualizations you're interacting
with are solving the differential equations for you. But by the end of this
course, setting up and solving the equation of motion for any mechanical
system happen like clockwork!
If a pendulum were all there is to Huygens's clocks, the "odd sympathy"
he noticed would never spontaneously arise. Like most interesting
phenomena in classical mechanics, his observation is the result of
an interaction, and it turns out there is more to Huygens's clocks than
meets the eye.

The challenge of building a clock with a pendulum for timekeeping is


that no matter how perfect your design is, the pendulum will not swing
regularly for more than a few minutes. Friction at the point of
attachment of the pendulum removes energy from it during each cycle.

The genius of Huygens’s invention was the addition of a mechanical


apparatus that used gravity to replace the energy dissipated by friction.
The so-called escapement gives the pendulum a sharp push once per
period. If you listen to a pendulum clock, you can hear the escapement
When Huygens hung two clocks side by side on a heavy beam and set
them running, they were not in direct contact, yet over time, they started
moving in a related way.

In fact, this kind of emergent behavior is common when simple


oscillators exert a small, but persistent, influence over each other. This
idea is the basis for a variety of phenomena, from phase transitions in
matter, to avalanches and forest fires, to the sensory-processing
capabilities of the brain. The common thread is interaction.

Which choice is likely the strongest interaction between the two clocks
shown?
Explanation
Correct answer: Vibrations along the beam when the escapement
ticks
Suppose we take two identical pendulum clocks and firmly attach them
to a heavy beam. Like all solid objects, the beam is a conduit for
vibrations. When one pendulum is kicked by the escapement, the
vibration passes the other clock.

Gravity is not an interaction between the clocks, per se, so this


interaction would not produce the oddly sympathetic motion.
KINEMATICS

 KINEMATICS IN THE CITY

Kinematics deals in tracking the state of an object as encoded by


its position, velocity, and acceleration.

In this quiz, we'll imagine ourselves a delivery person for Tony's pizza,
trying to make it around the city on a series of motorcycles. In analyzing
our motion from stop to stop, we'll apply common sense to calculate the
details of our motion, and try to generalize in anticipation of a formal
derivation of the kinematic relations in the next quiz.

To start, Tony's pizza gives us an entry level motorcycle that's a little


peculiar. Before turning it on, you set a velocity at which it will
move from the moment you turn it on, until the moment you turn it off.
You are traveling from your house to the pizzeria on the entry level
motorcycle. Recall that this motorcycle has a constant velocity from the
moment you turn it on until the moment you turn it off.

Which of the following velocity vs. time (vv vs. tt) curves represents


your motion through the city?

Explanation
Correct answer: B
The v  vs  t plot tracks our velocity over the course of our trajectory. No
motion would correspond to a flat line at v = 0 for all times t.

As our first motorcycle simply travels at a constant velocity, the 

v vs t plot is a flat line with .v > 0.


Suppose you set your motorcycle to velocity v and travel for a time T.

What is the relationship between your velocity, the time, and the
distance you travel d?

Explanation
Correct answer: d=vT
This problem is essentially probing the definition of velocity. If we
travel with velocity v, it means that we travel v units of length in a unit
of time. If we travel for  Δt units of time with velocity v, then our
distance travelled Δd will be vΔt.

Therefore, we can write d = v.T

Suppose you're on the way to Tony's pizzeria to start your day. You have
thirty minutes to get there, so you set your motorcycle to v1 = 10 km/h to
get there exactly on time (you assume you'll have no delays).

Fifteen minutes into your trip, you realize you're passing your cousin's
house, and you stop for five minutes to hang out.

At what speed v2 (in km/h) do you need to travel in the remaining ten


minutes to get there in time?

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