Saturday, November 14, 2009

The Physics of A Lazy Susan

As I was eating dinner with my family last night, I realized that the lady susan stationed in the middle of our dining table reminded me of the concepts we learned about uniform circular motion: period, centripetal acceleration, and tangential velocity. As the lady susan rotates, the salt shaker's centripetal acceleration still points towards the center of the circle and its velocity is always tangential to the lady susan.











In addition, the motion also applies to rotational kinematics. The salt shaker completes a whole revolution with an angular displacement of -2pi radians because the salt shaker moves at a clockwise direction. However, while the angular displacement is -2pi radians the linear displacement is 0 since the salt shaker starts and end at the same point. If there were another object located at the inner circle of the lady susan, both objects would have the same period, but the salt shaker (which is farther away from the center) has a greater angular velocity and angular acceleration because the salt shaker has the bigger radius.

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