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Re: Problem



At 14:33 -0400 9/20/01, Carl E. Mungan wrote:

>Similarly I've seen two names for the other component

1) Centripetal acceleration
2) perpendicular component

Actually one of my pet peeves is that there is another common name
which many textbooks use:
3) radial acceleration

Now that I've seen the error of my ways, I feel free to make
suggestions within the newly accepted catechism:

How about tangential and transverse? Neither implies a direction,
which is fine for tangential, but we know that the transverse
component is of necessity always directed toward the instantaneous
center of curvature of the trajectory (that's how it got curved in
that direction in the first place). But at least it doesn't imply
that it is directed away from the center of curvature, as "radial"
does. I agree that "centripetal" is too closely related to circular
motion to be useful here, although it does have the attribute that it
always points in the correct direction. So why not just the generic
"transverse"?

Hugh
--

Hugh Haskell
<mailto://haskell@ncssm.edu>
<mailto://hhaskell@mindspring.com>

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