Question: Comment on this post with a question.... Post: Question 19. If someone is riding in the back of a pickup truck and throws a softball
Comment on this post with a question....
Post:
Question 19.
If someone is riding in the back of a pickup truck and throws a softball straight backward, is it possible for the ball to fall straight down as viewed by a person standing at the side of the road? Under what condition would this occur? How would the motion of the ball appear to the person who threw it?
Answer:
If someone riding in the back of a pickup truck throws a softball straight backward, it is possible for the ball to appear to fall straight down to a person standing beside the road... but only under specific conditions. This occurs when the backward velocity of the ball relative to the truck exactly cancels the forward velocity of the truck relative to the ground. For instance, if the truck is moving forward at 10 m/s and the thrower releases the ball backward at 10 m/s (relative to the truck), the two horizontal velocities offset each other. From the roadside observer's frame of reference, the ball would have no horizontal motion and would fall vertically under the influence of gravity.
To the thrower, however, the motion looks different. Within the truck's frame of reference, the ball appears to move backward and then drop to the ground. This difference highlights one of the key ideas in kinematics,motion is relative to the observer's frame of reference. According to Urone and Hinrichs (n.d.), combining velocities from different reference frames involves vector addition, in which each velocity component contributes to the total observed motion. Understanding this relationship allows us to analyze how motion can appear completely different to two observers experiencing different frames.
This concept of relative motion extends beyond this simple example, it explains how aircraft adjust for wind direction, how boats navigate currents, and even how athletes account for environmental factors such as wind resistance when projecting an object. These real-world applications demonstrate the usefulness of understanding two-dimensional motion and velocity addition.
Step by Step Solution
There are 3 Steps involved in it
Get step-by-step solutions from verified subject matter experts
