About this video
A particle's speed is inversely proportional to the square of the distance S it has travelled. The instructor writes speed as dS/dt and turns the sentence into the differential equation dS/dt = k/S^2. He then explains why the other answer choices describe different relationships.
You'll be able to
- represent speed as the derivative of distance with respect to time, dS/dt.
- translate 'inversely proportional to the square of' into k/(something)^2.
- write a differential equation from a verbal description and reject equations that don't match.
Key words
- inversely proportional
- One quantity equals a constant divided by another, so as one grows the other shrinks.
- proportionality constant
- The fixed number k in a relationship like y = k/x.
- speed
- The rate of change of distance with respect to time, dS/dt.
- differential equation
- An equation that involves a derivative, such as dS/dt = k/S^2.
Transcript
- [Instructor] Particle moves along a straight line. Its speed is inversely proportional to the square of the distance, S, it has traveled. Which equation describes this relationship? So I'm not even gonna look at these choices, and I'm just gonna try to parse the sentence up here and see if we can come up with an equation.
So they tell us its speed is inversely proportional, to what? To the square of the distance, S, it has traveled. So S is equal to distance. S is equal to distance. And how would we denote speed then, if S is distance? Well speed is the rate of change of distance with respect to time.
So our speed would be the rate of distance with respect to time. The rate of change of distance with respect to time. So this is going to be our speed. So now that we got our notation, S is the distance, the derivative of S with respect to time is speed. We can say the speed which is d, capital S, dt, is inversely proportional.
So it's inversely proportional, I wrote a proportionality constant, over what? It's inversely proportional to what? To the square of the distance! To the square of the distance it has traveled. So there you go, this is an equation that I think is describing a differential equation, really that's describing what we have up here.
Now let's see, let's see what, which of these choices match that. Well actually this one is exactly what we wrote. The speed, the rate of change of distance with respect to time, is inversely proportional to the square of the distance. Now just to make sure we understand these other ones, let's just interpret them.
This is saying that the distance, which is a function of time, is inversely proportional to the time squared. That's not what they told us. This is saying that the distance is inversely proportional to the distance squared. That one is especially strange. And this is saying that the distance with respect to time, the change in distance with respect to time, the derivative of the distance with respect to time, dS/dt or the speed, is inversely proportional to time squared.
Well that's not what they said, they said it's inversely proportional to the square of the distance it has traveled. So we like that choice.
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