Be sure you understand why a pendulum in equilibrium hanging in a car that is accelerating forward tilts backward, and then consider the following: A helium balloon is anchored by a massless string to the floor of a car that is accelerating forward with acceleration A. Explain clearly why the balloon tends to tilt forward and find its angle of tilt in equilibrium. [Hint: Helium balloons float because of the buoyant Archimedean force, which results from a pressure gradient in the air. What is the relation between the directions of the gravitational field and the buoyant force?]
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Textbook Solutions for Classical Mechanics
Question
At a point P on the earth's surface, an enormous perfectly flat and frictionless platform is built. The platform is exactly horizontal that is, perpendicular to the local free-fall acceleration gp. Find the equation of motion for a puck sliding on the platform and show that it has the same form as (9.61) for the Foucault pendulum except that the pendulum's length L is replaced by the earth's radius R. What is the frequency of the puck's oscillations and what is that of its Foucault precession? [Hints: Write the puck's position vector, relative to the earth's center 0 as R r, where R is the position of the point P and r = (x, y, 0) is the puck's position relative to P. The contribution to the centrifugal force involving R can be absorbed into gp and the contribution involving r is negligible. The restoring force comes from the variation of g as the puck moves.] To check the validity of your approximations, compare the approximate size of the gravitational restoring force, the Coriolis force, and the neglected term m (St x r) x St in the centrifugal force.
Solution
Step 1 of 5
As we can see from fig the difference between Foucault pendulum and sliding on a flat plane with co-latitude is that there is no tension force, however, as we see from the fig as we move away from point
gravity
is no longer in
vertical direction, but has vertical and
and
components equal to the
sin
where alpha is the angle of
position to
to
and it can be represented in
and
direction as
and
.
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