The unit to measure speed is m/s which in a straightforward manner implies that x metres is covered per second however the unit for acceleration is m/s^2 which is kind of making it difficult to understand how it works..
I had this thought in the middle of a physics test and have been pondering ever since. Would be great if someone could eli5.
In: Physics
I always like to think of it as follows:
Say you’re in a rocket that’s accelerating. There’s a speedometer on the dash, and your copilot keeps calling out the speed. The first second he says “10m/s”. One second later he says “15 m/s”. One second after that he calls out “20 m/s”.
This means that every second the number he’s reading out increases by 5 m/s. In other words, it changes by 5 m/s, per second. Or (5m/s)/s.
Imagine you give an alias to the velocity unit. Let’s say a knot is 1 m/s. If a man walk with 5 knots, it means he will make 3.6*5 km in 1 hour, which is 18.
Now he starts with 0 knots, and then accelerates linearity until he reaches 6 knots after 1 minute. What was the median velocity increase? Well, 6/60 equals 0.1 knots / second, which you could replace with ( 0.1 m / s) / s.
How many m/s you gain each second?
For acceleration of ‘a’, you would gain ‘a’ m/s each second you move at acceleration ‘a’.
Meters per second is speed, how many meters you move per second. Meters per second per second is how much your speed (meters per second) increases per second.
The first thing we have to llok at is position, so called distance. For the first instant, we have one position, and then one second later we have another position. The difference between them is Velocity, aka Speed, distance over time. Now, we have a third second and third position. From position 2 to position 3 is another measure of distance, which took one second to cross, so we have a second velocity. Your Acceleration, velocity over time, would therefore be the difference between the two velocities, |V1 – V2|.
This comes in the unit of distance per time per time,which is where your confusion comes from. Think of it more as velocity per time, or the change in velocity.
Acceleration is a measure of how quickly something is speeding up or slowing down. The unit used to measure acceleration is called “meters per second squared” (m/s²). Let’s break down how this unit works in a simple way.
Meters (m): This part represents the distance. A meter is a measure of how far something moves. Imagine you’re playing with a toy car, and you want to know how far it travels. You would measure that distance in meters.
Per Second (per s): This part represents time. It tells us how quickly something is happening over a period of time. In this case, it’s “per second.” So, it’s like asking, “How much distance does something cover in one second?”
Squared (²): This part means that you’re multiplying something by itself. In the context of acceleration, it means you’re looking at how much speed is changing every second.
So, when you measure acceleration in meters per second squared (m/s²), you’re essentially calculating how much an object’s speed is changing over a one-second period. For example, if a car goes from 0 meters per second (stationary) to 10 meters per second in 1 second, its acceleration would be 10 m/s² because it increased its speed by 10 meters per second in one second.
In simpler terms, acceleration is all about how fast something is speeding up or slowing down, and the unit m/s² helps us quantify that change in speed over time.
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