Speed, Velocity, Change

basic idea #1 alculus is the mathematics of change, and change is mysterious. some things grow imperceptibly... others zoom... hair grows slowly and is suddenly cut... temperatures rise and fall... smoke curls through the air... planets wheel through space... and time, time never stops...

Chapter -1

think hard about change, and you may reach some pretty strange conclusions. in ancient greece, for example, zeno of elea thought about change and convinced himself that motion is impossible. he reasoned like so:

motion is a change of position over time.

at any instant, no change of position takes place.

therefore, there can be no motion at any instant.

but time is a succession of instants.

therefore, motion never takes place!

did I get over here?

hey! how

even time moves... its so weird...

in the late 1600s, roughly 2,000 years after zeno, two other guys had a different idea. actually, I had the idea and you stole it!

you took the words right out of my mouth...

isaac newton and gottfried leibniz

looked at the problem this way: even though a moving cannonball goes nowhere in an instant, still it has something that indicates motion.

what it has is velocity, a number. you might say that every object carries around an invisible meter that reads out the objects speed and direction at all times.

oh, now Im beginning to see...

in other words, we can imagine that everything has a sort of speedometer, just like the one in a car (except that this speedometer indicates direction too).
3

a pretty sharp idea for newton and leibniz to have had, considering that speedometers wouldnt be invented for another 200 years yet... whats a speedometer?

whats a car?

how did our two geniuses get the idea? to answer this, lets explore a cars speedometer reading.

actually, we want a velocimeter, not a speedometer. a velocimeter looks just like a speedometer, except that it attaches a minus sign to the speed when the car is backing up. velocity is the negative of the speed when you go in reverse.

20 40 60
4

forsooth!
20 40 60

to appreciate the difference between speed and velocity, imagine a car moving forward for one hour at a steady rate of 50 km/hr, then turning around and coming back (in a negative direction) for another hour at the same speed.

10

20

30

40

50

10

20

30

40

50

the speed is always 50 km/hr, and the car travels a total distance of 100 km: 50 km going out and 50 km coming back. the distance is the speed times the elapsed time: total distance = speed elapsed time
=(50 km/hr)(2 hr) =100 km

the average speed is the total distance divided by the time. speedav = = elapsed time
100 km

total distance

2 hr

50 km/hr

total change of position is zero

the car ends where it started!

but in terms of velocity, the car moves at 50 KM/hr the first hour, and at 50 km/hr the second hour. THE

its average velocity is the change of position divided by the elapsed time.

vav = elapsed time

in this case,

change of position quite a difference!

say, whered you learn to drive?

copied you.

0 km vav = 2 hr

km/hr

0
5

in symbols: if t1 andt2 are any two times, and an object is at position s1 at timet1 and at positions2 at timet2, then the objects average velocity over the time interval between t1 andt2 is

now we need a better driversomeone with a steadier footso lets put my friend delta wye behind the wheel...

or

s2 s 1 v av = t2 t 1

yo!

s2 s 1 = v av(t2 t 1 )

what does it mean when deltas velocimeter reads 100 km/hr? for one thing, it must mean that if she were to hold her velocity perfectly steady, then she would go 100 km in one hour, right? (delta has mounted a clock on the roof for clarity.) if I start here at noon... I arrive here at one oclock!

t hours... a formula that should work even for

and wed go 200 km in 2 hours, 50 km in half an hour, 100t kilometers in

er... logical, I guess...

t2 t 1 (hours) 10 9 5 1 0.5 0.1 0.01 0.001 0.0001 0.0000001

s2 s 1 (kilometers) 1000 900 500 100 50 10 1 0.1 0.01 0.00001

short time intervals.

at a perfectly steady 100 km/hr, delta goes 1 km in hour (36 seconds), 0.1 km in0.001 hour (3.6 seconds), and 0.001 km, one meter, in0.00001 hr, or0.036 seconds.
6

thats if the velocity remains perfectly steady... but in the real world, velocity changes as a car slows down and speeds up. what does the reading mean then? (now shes added a velocimeter up top as well.) VElocity = 0
speeding up

velocity high
slowing down

velocity lower

constant over a time span of, say, 1/ 500 sec. a photo taken with a short exposure would show a velocimeter image with virtually no blur.

the answer is a little subtle: youve surely noticed that over a very short time period, a speedometer doesnt change much. even if you floor it,v is nearly

whats a photo?

this was newtons and leibnizs

calculate the ratio (s2 s 1)/(t 2 t 1 ) over a very short time interval. for
all intents and purposes, this ratio is the velocity at time t 1 (and also at t2 , theyre so close!).

Basic Idea:

to put it another way, a bodys instantaneous velocity is closely approxi mated by (s2 s 1)/(t 2 t 1 ) when t2 t 1 is small. (you might wonder how newton and leibniz thought they might actually measure a change of position over a time interval of, say, 0.00001 sec., but never mind that!)

arrhefff!
its the principle of the thing...

but newton and leibniz wanted more than an approximation: they wanted the velocitys exact value...and whats more, they showed how to get it! forget measurement: they used math, a new kind of math they invented especially for the purpose. and well call it fluxions! no. we wont.

we call it calculus.
8

if a bodys position depends on time according to some formula, then calculus pops out a new, exAct formula for the velocity at any time.

this seemed so magical that more than a few people found it suspicious... weird... based on strange, unfounded assumptions... somehow... wrong...

youre almost dividing by zero!

(leibnizs approach seemed especially fishy: he was happy to divide one thing by another not only when the quantities were small, but also when they were infinitely small but not zero, whatever that meant.) freak!

fishy foundations or not, calculus worked, and it worked beautifully. it was amazingly effective. it produced results! MANY, , many results... whoa!

so people put calculus to work... not only finding velocities, but also the rate of change of all kinds of fluctuating quantities. calculus is used everywhere!

astronomy, communications, electricity, biology, chemistry, mechanics, statistics, computer science, psychology, economics...

population dynamics...

eventually, they even fixed the foundations, more or less... unfortunately, we lack the space to explain fully how this was done, or to describe the troublesome issues raised by calculus... lets just say that some of zenos subtleties remain a challenge to this day...

hey, man, you worry too much!

yeah, cmon! whatever works...

10