TITLE: mechanics: Circular motion
SECTION: Circular motion
Consider a coordinate system, as shown in Figure 8A, with the circle centred at the origin. At any instant of time, the position of the particle may be specified by giving the radius r of the circle and the angle θ between the position vector and the x-axis. Although r is constant, θ increases uniformly with time t, such that θ = ωt, or...
...(Parallax is the apparent displacement of an object when viewed from different vantage points). Hipparchus thus calculated that the mean distance of the Moon from the Earth is 77 times the Earth’s radius. In the second method he hypothesized that the distance from the centre of the Earth to the Sun is 490 times the Earth’s radius—perhaps chosen because that is the shortest distance...
TITLE: sound: The inverse square law
SECTION: The inverse square law
...over an increasingly larger circumference. The intensity, or energy per unit of length along the circumference of the circle, will therefore decrease in an inverse relationship with the growing radius of the circle, or distance from the source of the wave. In the same way, as a spherical wave front expands, its energy is distributed over a larger and larger surface area. Because the surface...