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Graphs (2012)

Page history last edited by Joe Redish 11 years, 6 months ago

Class content > The Main Question: Motion > Kinematics

 

Prerequisites

 

Graphs for the eye, graphs for the mind

We've talked about how we quantify space and time and how we create a kind of an abstract "map" of space by creating a spatial coordinate system that allows us to tell where something is.  The track of a motion in a spatial coordinate system provides a graph for the eye as it represents the track of what the eye would actually see. In the picture below is shown a spatial coordinate system used to describe the motion a ballet dancer performing a grand jeté (big jump).  The track of green dots is the position of her eye in subsequent frames of the movie.  This is what the phrase "graph for the eye" means (our eye -- not hers).  The track shows the actual position of the object as it moves through space.

 

 

But often we are interested not just in the path, but in how the path evolves against time.  In this case, we would construct mathematical graphs using one of the position coordinates (or a velocity, acceleration, or force) and plot it against time. If we plotted the x data of this graph as a function of time we would get the graph below. (Note that there is a suppressed zero on the vertical [x] axis.)

 

 

This does NOT look like what your eye sees directly. To make sense of it, you have to translate -- interpret what the graph is telling you into physical meaning. It says at the start of the film (taken to be t = 0 s), her eye is about 2.7 m to the right of the 0 of the x axis and as she moves the x-coordinate of her eye decreases (she is moving to the left -- towards the origin) at approximately a uniform rate as she moves.

 

Horizontal and vertical axes

Often, when you draw graphs in math classes you are graphing some function of an independent variable called x.  So the equation graphed is "y = f (x)" and your horizontal axis is called the "x axis" and the vertical axis the "y axis". This is very bad practice as you can see from the graphs above.  That notation works OK for the first graph (the spatial coordinate system) but does not for the second -- since the "x axis" is really "t" there and the "y axis" is really "x".  Calling the horizontal and vertical axes "x and y" is going to be immensely confusing since only in a small number of cases will we actually be plotting "x and y".  Get used to calling them the horizontal and vertical axes. (The correct technical name for the horizontal and vertical axes is "abscissa" and "ordinate" but these terms are not used very often anymore.  Note that for "x-y", "horizontal-vertical", and "abscissa-ordinate", each pair is in alphabetical order. That's a useful memory trick.)

 

Joe Redish 7/25/11

 

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