Something I don’t quite understand from a physics standpoint. Imagine a car going down a road approaching a roundabout, on neutral; it can follow the roundabout 180 degrees and start going in the reverse direction while only losing a little speed/energy. But the car did a lot of “work” in the physics sense — a multi-thousand-pound vehicle completely reversed direction in a few seconds. How is that energy redistributed (force diagram, etc) to show where the energy for all that work came from?
In: 5
Think of it like this.
When you skateboard down a U ramp, you come up the other side right? That is because as you go around the ramp, you are constantly changing that downwards momentum into sideways momentum at the cost of some of the energy.
Now think how much sideways momentum you would get if you just dropped from a building, NONE. That energy has to be FULLY stopped and then re added in the opposite direction rather than deflecting the energy around a curve.
Think about if when running in soccer, instead of running and then turning 45 degrees mid run, you had to stop running, turn 45 degrees, and then get back up to speed.
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