Speaker
Tatsu Takeuchi
(Virginia Tech)
Description
At the past few meetings, we presented demos we called "Let it go" and "Defying Gravity." "Let it go" was a demo involving rolling objects downhill. It showed that the speed of the objects at the bottom of the hill depended on the object's moment of inertia. "Defying gravity" was a demo which involved a pair of rails arranged in a V-shape with the open end raised above the closed end. When an object shaped like two cones glued to each other is placed on the rails, it rolls uphill due to its center-of-mass actually being lowered as the object rolled. In this talk, we will derive the accelerations of the objects in these demos.
Primary author
Tatsu Takeuchi
(Virginia Tech)
Co-author
Henry Hilgendorf
(Virginia Tech Department of Physics)
