(eli5) whats the difference in radians and degrees (pls give real life examples)
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On the surface, they’re just two different ways of measuring angles. It’s like asking what’s the difference between feet and meters…they both measure lengths, one’s just bigger than the other one.
However. Degrees are kind of arbitrary. We decided to chop up a circle into some number of units and ended up choosing 360 (read other comments here for how/why that particular number). Which is fine but there’s nothing particularly mathematically profound about 360, it’s just convenient.
Radians, on the other hand, aren’t arbitrary…they’re very specifically chosen so that an angle of one radian in a circle has an arc length that’s exactly as long as the radius of the circle. This probably *sounds* arbitrary but, from a math/physics standpoint, it’s *far* more fundamental than a degree. Among other things, it grossly simplifies the math behind rotational motion and everything that uses rotational-type math (which is more than you might think). If you work in degrees you constantly have to carry conversion factors around, if you work in radians it’s the “natural” angle that falls out of other math and it all just works without having to keep track of units. This is why pretty much all physics/engineering works in radians. The only thing degrees are good for are navigation and geometry.
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