Before you read this, I suggest you read posts 17.17 and 17.41. How can you calculate the rate of flow of a viscous liquid in a very narrow tube? The obvious answer is to solve the Navier-Stokes equation (post 17.15) for this type of flow. But that involves a lot of mathematics. We can get… Continue reading 17.42 Dimensional analysis

Most people have seen Einstein’s famous equation E = mc2.                    (1) But what does it mean? It means that if stuff with a mass m is completely destroyed, it changes into energy E, when c represents the speed of light in a vacuum. When I say, “completely destroyed”, I don’t broken or burnt (burning simply… Continue reading 17.41 Units in equations

Before you read this, I suggest you read posts 17.38 and 17.39. We are all familiar with rolling objects (a ball rolling along the ground or the wheel of a moving car); as a result, we tend not to think much about rolling and may not appreciate how complicated it is. The picture above shows… Continue reading 17.40 Rolling

In posts 17.11 and 17.12 we saw that angular displacement, angular speed and angular acceleration can be defined, as vectors, in a way that is analogous to displacement, velocity and acceleration (post 17.4) along a line (not necessarily a straight line) in space – translational motion. In post 16.12, we saw that translational motion could… Continue reading 17.39 Translational and rotational motion