I googled this but I still don’t get it. I’m not mathematics inclined at all so literally make this a ELI5!
In: 11
Imagine you’re a spherical cow in outer space. You want to start moving towards some tasty gas grass. You can’t just teleport there, you have to move there. So you start moving. How fast are you moving? You are going 10 meters every second. That is meters per second, or m/s. This is velocity. But wait, you didn’t suddenly and instantaneously start moving that fast, you had to get up to that speed. It turns out, every second you were going 1 meter per second faster than the previous. You are increasing your speed at one meter per second per second or 1 m/s^2. This is acceleration. It’s how fast you are changing your velocity, measured in distance over time, over time. It’s a rate of change of a rate of change.
Note: speed is direction less, velocity is a vector, it has a direction. Hence my use of speed and velocity in those specific circumstances.
Also note: this is calculus. Calculus is all about rates of change. If you take the derivative of something, that’s a rate of change. Velocity is the derivative of position, and acceleration is the derivative of velocity. This is why it’s position over time, and then that previous quantity over time again. You can use this to derive almost all of Newtonian physics in fact.
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