Einstein and Infeld wrote that physics is like a detective novel: Nature is the culprit, the scientist the detective who reconstructs the facts from the clues (Einstein and Infeld 1938, ch. 1). Motion is the most immediate clue. Kinematics is the branch of physics that describes how bodies move, without asking why: the why will be left to forces, in the chapter on dynamics. This chapter introduces the quantities of motion, the equations of uniformly accelerated motion, the extension to vectors and the plane, and uniform circular motion.
Sections
- Fundamental quantities of motion
- Unit conversion
- Trigonometry review
- Uniformly accelerated rectilinear motion
- Vectors and motion in two dimensions
- Uniform circular motion