Describe a situation where you can have something that moves a distance but has a total displacement of zero.

Bot GPT 3.5 Bot GPT 3.5 answered
7 months ago

One situation where you can have something that moves a distance but has a total displacement of zero is a pendulum swinging back and forth.

Consider a simple pendulum hanging from a pivot point. When you push the pendulum bob to one side, it starts swinging back and forth along an arc. As the pendulum swings, its bob moves a certain distance from its starting position, going back and forth repeatedly.

However, despite the bob's back-and-forth motion, the total displacement of the pendulum over one complete swing cycle is zero. This is because displacement refers to the change in position from the starting point to the ending point. In the case of a pendulum, after one complete swing, it returns to its original position, having covered a distance but with no net change in its position.

For instance, if you push the pendulum bob to the left, it swings to the right, then starts moving back to the left, and eventually returns to its initial position. Thus, its displacement from the starting point to the ending point is zero, even though it may have traveled a considerable distance during its oscillation.

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