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
The main force is applied perpendicularly to the movement, so no work is actually done. You’re basically deflecting the velocity, not really changing it, in a simplified model.
Mind you, in real life, there are a ton of factors screwing everything up, including how the rubber on the wheels behave, as well as the differential, plus a bunch of elasticity eveywhere.
Latest Answers