Kinematics?

here

i could at least kind of understand when people were too lazy to look things up in a *paper* dictionary... but now that page flipping isn''t even necessary, there is NO excuse.

Yep, krez, I looked it up, gimme some credit

I''m coming from a fairly naive perspective though (dont really know alot of maths or physics), and I dont undersand how we can study motion without considerations of mass and force, which is what kinematics, seemingly, by definition, is. ie: We cant have motion without force, and everything has mass, so what does kinematics do/record/explain ?

If this is in the wrong forum, sorry.

Tim.

my bad, that was kinda snippy of me...

kinematics deals with motion, without worrying about forces or mass or any of that (mainly because it is used for things where mass is constant and forces are irrelevant). such as:

displacement = velocity * delta-time

regardless of the mass of an object, or what forces caused it to move, the fact still remains that it will travel a certain distance when it goes at a certain speed for a certain amount of time. it doesn''t matter how much energy was involved in this motion, the goal is to find out how far it got given the assumptions. kinematics is a subset of dynamics, which does include the details about the forces and masses involved.

*** 500 error ***
*** 500 error ***

Thats interesting, thanks.

It sounds like its more like geometry than anything else. The description of movement (erm, position) against time is like plotting a line or curve on x and y axes. Thanks.

Tim.