UM & AM
Uniform and Accelerated Motion
My 12-year-old grandson left Croatia at the end of his summer vacation and returned to New York a month ago. I taught him some phenomena from mechanics since, knowing what I do, he was curious about what physicists study.
At school, he takes a science class, but the material focuses on the Earth's geological structure, including tectonic plates, faults, and different types of rock.
Now, while cleaning up the room, I came across a piece of cardboard on which he wanted to demonstrate how he understood what I was telling him about Newton's first and second laws. I remember telling him that if the forces acting on the body are equal, the body's velocity remains constant. And if there is an unbalanced force, the body's velocity changes. In doing so, we dealt briefly with the English expressions "speed" and "velocity," for which there are no separate words in Croatian.
Instead, we're talking about a change in "speed" both by amount and by direction. We tried to define "scalar" and "vector".
I measured the cardboard he was drawing on and discovered that, quite by chance, the aspect ratio of that rectangle met the "golden ratio".
Here's the cardboard; one side is uniform, while the other side depicts accelerated motion.