(Answered, thanks yall) Basically I have three competing understandings: potential energy with respect to height is linear AND gravity is constant in force applied per time (right?) AND at the end of falls you are losing height faster because greater speed.
So with these three things being my understanding I don’t understand how at the end of a fall (some arbitrary speed) you can lose more height and thus PE per second but be accelerated at the same force. I don’t see how you could expend more PE but not be putting in more energy to acceleration… Where does that extra PE lost by higher speed go? Does it take more energy to accelerate when moving faster? It shouldn’t I think ignoring fancy energy momentum stuff that doesn’t apply at 10 mph lol.
So yeah, I don’t get it. I’d be very grateful is someone could solve this for me. I know I must be missing something but don’t know what. This is a question i’ve argued with my brother about a little and tried to look up a few times but the forum posts I’ve found aren’t exactly my issue I think. I also tried asking some ai and it didn’t see my problem I think. For the record I’m in school for chemistry so not a lay person per se but not well read at all either.
In: Physics
Kinetic energy is (1/2)mv^2, so it makes sense that when you are in free-fall, with velocity increasing linearly (and hence kinetic energy increasing faster than linear) the result is that your gravitational potential energy is decreasing faster than linear with respect to time.
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