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The rapidly rotating blade of a table saw certainly has kinetic energy due to that rotation. How can we express the energy? We cannot apply the familiar formula  to the saw as a whole because that would give us the kinetic energy only of the saw’s center of mass, which is zero. Instead, we shall treat…

In Section 4-7, we discussed uniform circular motion, in which a particle travels at constant linear speed ν along a circle and around an axis of rotation. When a rigid body, such as a merry-go-round, rotates around an axis, each particle in the body moves in its own circle around that axis. Since the body is rigid, all…

In pure translation, motion with a constant linear acceleration (for example, that of a falling body) is an important special case. In Table 2-1, we displayed a series of equations that hold for such motion. In pure rotation, the case of constant angular acceleration is also important, and a parallel set of equations holds for this case also. We shall…

We can describe the position, velocity, and acceleration of a single particle by means of vectors. If the particle is confined to a straight line, however, we do not really need vector notation. Such a particle has only two directions available to it, and we can indicate these directions with plus and minus signs. In…

We wish to examine the rotation of a rigid body about a fixed axis. A rigid body is a body that can rotate with all its parts locked together and without any change in its shape. A fixed axis means that the rotation occurs about an axis that does not move. Thus, we shall not examine an object like…

As we have discussed, one focus of physics is motion. However, so far we have examined only the motion of translation, in which an object moves along a straight or curved line, as in Fig. 10-1a. We now turn to the motion of rotation, in which an object turns about an axis, as in Fig. 10-1b. The number of times you…