Role of Mass Distribution in the Demonstration of Amperian Longitudinal Electrodynamic Forces - Digital Download

by Neal Graneau

This 7-page paper was published in Issue 63 (2005).

From the Introduction: "Physicists and engineers predict the motion of an object by applying known force laws and calculating the net force and impulse acting on it. With knowledge of the mass of the object, Newton's second law of motion yields a value for its acceleration. However, for impulses of large force but
short duration, the acceleration may be too fast to be measured and thus it is often easier to just record the object's maximum velocity. One must however be very careful in the consequent dynamical analysis because unlike its acceleration, the velocity acquired by a test object depends not just on its mass, but also on the mass of the equipment on which the reaction force is impressed..."