Readings

Acceleration due to gravity

An exercise on understanding basic principles
We learn about the way things fall from our earliest days. Your first scientific
experiment was probably to drop a rattle over the side of your pram and
carefully watch its fall. You were happy to do this for as long as anyone could
be induced to pick it up for you again. Plants know about gravity and send
their roots down and their shoots up. They can be fooled by putting them in
a rotating basket, when they will send their shoots towards the centre.
Animals know about the dangers of gravity and even young mice will not fall
off the end of a table. Cuckoos exploit gravity in a clever way. The cuckoo
lays its eggs singly in the nest of another species of bird. It arranges its
timing so that the cuckoo's egg hatches first, and almost as soon as it can
walk the hatchling proceeds to remove the other eggs from the nest. It
spreads its immature wings and, walking backwards up the side of the nest,
pushes the egg until it topples over the top of the nest. Of course, the egg
often slips off the back of the cuckoo chick and great perseverance is needed
to get rid of all the eggs in the nest. The effort is worth it, however, as the
cuckoo now enjoys the undivided attention of its unwitting foster parents.
We now know that falling objects do not move with constant speed, but
accelerate. Galileo was the first to make the point clearly, although it had
been known before. It is surprising that the ancients did not know it, since
we can learn it from common observations. You know that cricketers find it
easy to catch a gentle lob but often drop one when fielding on the boundary
(even professionals sometimes drop a skier). You also know that you will
not be hurt if you jump from a metre-high wall, you may break a leg if you
jump from 5 m, and you will certainly be killed if you fall from the top of a
skyscraper. The ancients must have known this - indeed both the Romans
and the Hebrews executed wrongdoers by throwing them off high cliffs.
Their ways of thinking did not lead them to make general conclusions of this
kind.
Galileo knew that all objects fall with the same acceleration. It does now
seem that the charming story of him dropping different weights from the top
of the Leaning Tower of Pisa is not a myth, although historians keep
changing their minds. When I wrote an earlier draft of this chapter a year
ago, I was told that the story had no basis in fact.
Now I read that it is probably true. He is also supposed to have tied a series
of weights to a long string with the distances between the weights in the
ratio 1:3:5:7 . . . and so on. When the string was dropped, the weights hit the
floor and the intervals between the noises they made were constant. The
distances through which the weight fell were then in the ratio 1:4:9:16 . . . : a
result that he had already obtained for his experiment of rolling a ball down
a long slope.
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Galileo also knew that the path of a projectile is a parabola. He even

published tables of the range of artillery for different muzzle velocities. He
worked out that for optimum range, the angle was 45°, These tables must
have been quite useless because there was no way of finding the speed of the
cannon balls, and also because they did not take air resistance into account.
However, the development of artillery attracted (comparatively) as much
attention and commercial enterprise then as the 'Star Wars' programme
does now.

Questions _________________________________
1.1 Someone is looking out of the top floor window of a skyscraper with a
brick in his hand. At the same instant, someone else is looking out of
the window of the floor below. She also holds a brick. If both bricks
are dropped at the same instant, will the distance between them
(a) increase,
(b) stay the same,
(c) decrease? Agus
1.2 You are standing at the top of a high cliff with a brick in each hand.
You drop one brick and one second later you drop the other brick.
How does the distance between the bricks change? Does it
(a) get shorter because the second brick is accelerating,
or
(b) stay the same because the acceleration on both bricks is the
same,
or
(c) increase because the first brick is always moving faster than the
second one? Agus
1.3 If you have not done this already, answer the
last question by sketching a v-t graph. Anula
1.4 A child climbs to the top of a slide in a
children's park. As she slides to the bottom we
can say that
(a) her acceleration increases and her speed
increases,
(b) her acceleration increases and her speed
decreases,
(c) her acceleration decreases and her speed
decreases,
(d) her acceleration decreases and her speed
increases.
Which is correct, assuming that friction is
negligible? Anula
1.5 Which of the above is correct if friction is taken into account? You will
have to analyse the forces acting on the child, and work out under
what conditions friction is considerable. Apolonia

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1.6 In practice, is friction between a child and a slide very small?

How do you know? Apolonia
1.7 A ball is thrown vertically upwards with speed 20 m s-1. How far
does it go in 4 s? Atika
1.7 What is the displacement of the ball in the previous question? Atika
1.9 In 1966, the Surveyor 1 spaceship landed on the Moon. Rocket
motors held its speed of descent constant at 15 m s_1 from 12 m
above the surface to 4 m up. The motors were then shut off. If the
acceleration due to gravity on the Moon is 1.6 m s~2, with what
speed did the rocket hit the Moon's surface? Dewi
Not long ago, a television programme showed a man who could jump
1.10
over cars driven at him at a speed of, say, 20 ms'1. Assuming that the
car was 1.5 m tall and that the man could jump a height of 1.8 m, was
the film a fake? Dewi
In an emergency, you have a reaction time of about 0.7 s and your car
1.11 has a maximum deceleration of the order of —7.5 m s~2. How long
would it take you to stop when travelling at 30 m s_1? How far would
you go in that time? Idawati
1.12 The first science fiction story seems to have been written by Kepler
(one of the giants on whose shoulders Newton stood). He knew that
the Moon rotates on its axis with the same period as it rotates round
the Earth and therefore always presents the srme face to us. (I
remember being told as a boy that one thing w( humans could never
hope to see was the back of the moon.) Kepler imagined that there
were two races of people on the Moon: the Subvolvans who always
saw the Earth and the Prevolvans who never saw it. For these
people, how many days were there in a year? What was the great
disadvantage in living on the Moon? Idawati
1.13 You are walking down the street when an overhead power line
snaps, and you are hit by the bare wire. If the line is 8 m above the
ground and it takes 1 s for the automatic mechanism at the power
station to shut off the current, are you killed? Intan ENK
1.14 Does your distance from the power station and the speed of the
current in the wire come into it? Intan ENK
1.15 Why does a stream of water get thinner some way below the tap?
Leona

1.16 When I did the experiment with the hot water

tap in the kitchen, I found that the rate of flow A
was about 150 ml in 2 s or 75 cm3 s-1. (It is more
convenient to work this question in cm.) The
dimensions of the stream were as shown. Work
out the speed of flow at the top and bottom (v0
and v respectively), and show that these figures
are in accord with the formula v2 = v02 + 2ad.
(Alternatively, the Bemouilli equation,
Vip\V2 = V2p2v22 — P2§h, applies.) Leona

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1.17 A flea jumps off with a speed of 1 m s_1. How high can it jump? (I
suspect that the source of my data actually worked out this question
backwards. I do not know how else you could measure the speed of a
flea's take-off.) Nadia
1.18 A kangaroo can jump vertically 2.8 m (i.e. raise its centre of mass that
distance). What is its take-off speed? (Deer can clear fences almost as
high.) Nadia
1.19 If you wanted to repeat Galileo's experiment with the weights tied to
a string (mentioned in the reading), would you hold the string with
the small separations at the top or the bottom? Where must the
lowest weight be? Nita

Weightlessness
An exercise in understanding basic concepts
There are two basic ways in which you can be weightless. One way is to go in
a space ship far out in space, so far from any heavenly body that its
gravitational field is effectively zero; then you will be weightless. This state
has only, so far, been achieved by science fiction characters. The nearest that
real people will come to experiencing it will be on NASA's planned journey
to put a man on Mars by the year 2000. It will be a long time before humans
are able to leave the solar system, though. Unmanned space ships have been
sent beyond it; Voyager, after visiting Jupiter and Saturn, is now moving ever
further away, although it is still not beyond the orbit of Pluto.
The other way in which people become weightless is during a trip to the
Moon or while orbiting the Earth.
Then the only force acting on the space ship and its crew is
gravity, because no force is needed to keep the craft
circling the Earth. The force required is the centripetal
force, and gravity supplies this. The situation is exactly the
same as if you were in a lift and someone cut the steel
rope. If you were standing on a weighing machine at the
time, you would find that the machine registered zero. You
(and everything in the lift) would appear to be weightless,
although the force of gravity would still be acting in the
usual way. In the early days of space travel, it was feared
that astronauts might suffocate while they slept. Normally,
the air we breathe out is heated by its passage through our
lungs, expands and so becomes lighter than the
surrounding cold air, and rises by convection. In a
weightless environment there is no convection and it was
thought that each sleeping astronaut would be enveloped
in a cloud of his own exhaled air. In fact these fears were

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groundless; the air purifiers sucked in the air and mixed it sufficiently.
You can try a similar experiment by putting a lighted
candle in a large Kilner jar, sealing the lid and dropping it
about one metre. If you catch the jar gently, you will find
that the candle is extinguished. Another simple experiment strings
is to fit a tin can with some strings (as shown here) and
hang a weight from the strings.
You drop the can, about a metre; the weight will only hit
the bottom of the can when you catch it. While it was
falling, the weight was effectively weightless.
Another hazard of space flight was discovered after one
of the early flights. It was found that some people sneezed
a lot and that this was due to the minute hairs from electric
shavers floating about in the weightless cabin. Now, the
weight
shavers are fitted with small vacuum cleaners to suck up
the hairs, but most astronauts prefer to grow beards.
(Another reason for having women astronauts?) can

Questions _________________________________
2.1 What is the control experiment for the 'candle in the Kilner jar'
experiment? Nita
2.2 What is the control experiment for the 'dropping tin can' experiment?
2.3 How do you know that no work is needed to keep a satellite orbiting
the Earth? Rendik
2.4 How do you know that no work is needed to keep the Earth in orbit
round the Sun? Rendik
2.5 In Jules Verne's novel 'A voyage to the Moon and a trip round it, we
read about a space ship (fired out of a cannon) going to the Moon. The
crew notice that they gradually get lighter and at a point like X in the
diagram they are completely weightless. What is wrong with that?
Reni
2.6 Under what (very unlikely) circumstances could you be
weightless only at the point X? Reni

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2.7 The sketch below shows the approximately parabolic path taken by a
KC-135 (Boeing 707) airplane while allowing astronauts in training
to experience weightlessness. You will see that the astronauts
undergo weightlessness (and periods of almost double weight) for
long enough for experiments to be performed to test how well they
keep their manual dexterity under these strange conditions. If at the
top of the path the speed is 515 km h_1 (140 m s_1) and the radius of
curvature of the path is about 1600 m, confirm that the astronauts
are indeed weightless then. Riza

2.8 In one of H. G. Wells' stories there is a character called Mr Cavor who

invents a substance which he names 'cavorite'. This has the property
of shielding things from the effects of gravity. He makes a space ship
and surrounds it with cavorite, apart from some shutters which open.
When he wants to take off, he opens the shutter facing the Moon and
the Moon's gravitational attraction pulls him off. He steers by opening
other shutters facing the appropriate stars.
It is possible to shield against electrical effects, and both gravity and
electricity follow an inverse-square law. So why do we think that it is
unlikely that cavorite will ever be made? Sifa
2.9 Military men are said to want the discovery of substances with
negative mass, on the supposition that a missile made of such a
substance would rise up from the surface of the Earth and so end all
their launching problems. Suppose that it were possible to make
matter with negative mass, would it rise up from the Earth?
(Incidentally, a group of men still have outstanding a multimillion
dollar suit against the Mahareshi Yogi because of his failure to teach
them to levitate as promised. There is a photograph in existence
which allegedly shows grown men levitating; actually they are
hopping in the lotus position, and very painful it must be.) Uulia
2.10 We know that two masses in empty space attract each other,
according to Newton's law. What would happen to two spherical
voids in a large lump of matter? Would they attract or repel each
other?Silvi
2.11 A helicopter is used to lift live deer out of the bush. If a deer has mass
600 kg and the helicopter is rising at a constant 2m/s, what is the
tention on the rope? Tri
2.12 Now suppose that helicopter is rising with a constsn acceleration of

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2m/s. What is the tension now?Tri

2.13 On the planet Jupiter, the acceleration duet o gravity is 25m/s-2. If you
can clear 1,6m in a high jump on earth, how high could you jump in
jupiter? Treat this question simplistically. As it depends on
supposition, there is No. point in being too pernickety.) Yuwelmin
2.14 It is said that if and when astronauts reach Jupiter, they will not be
able to stan dup but will have to crawl on all fours. What do you
think? Yuwelmin
2.15 A locust (mass 3.0 g) takes off with a force of about 0.45N applied a
tan angle of about 600. Calculate its initial acceleration. If that
acceleration acts over a distance of about 4 cm, calculate the locust’s
take off speed, and how high and how far it can jump. Eri