1.

You got yourself in a traffic mishap and the driver you were involved with claimed to have been
innocent. He states that you were the one speeding up. There were no surveillance cameras present in
the area, but there were skid marks on the pavement. How will you defend yourself?

Answer:

Skid marks are frictional marks, and they typically happen when a car brakes and the wheel of the
vehicle stops suddenly to cause its rubber to slide on the surface of the road. Typically, the longer the
skid mark produced, the faster the car is moving. This is reasonable because if we are going to recall
Work-Energy Theorem and Newton’s Second Law of Motion, where the magnitude of a non-
conservative force such as friction multiplied by its distance travelled equals the half of the object’s
mass times velocity squared (Fd=(1/2)mv^2), we can observe that skidding distance is directly
proportional to the square of velocity. This means that if the speed doubles, then the skidding distance
quadruples.

With this information, I can defend myself by letting the police measure the length of the skid marks for
both my vehicle and the vehicle of the other driver. If the skid marks are longer for the other driver’s
car, then that means that I am innocent and that they are the one who is speeding up.

2. Give a SPECIFIC SITUATION for each of the following, (the most unique answer gets additional points),
a. the distance is greater than the displacement; b. the distance is equal to the displacement; c. the
distance is lesser than the displacement.

Answer:

One specific example that I can give in explaining situations where the distance is greater than the
displacement is that if one person will calculate how much path that they have covered from the
moment they wake up on the side of their bed; to going outside their room to eat, brush their teeth,
and do morning rituals; to riding a vehicle on their way to work; and returning all the way back to that
same spot on side of their bed to rest and sleep once again when the day finishes off; the distance
covered by that person will be huge, as it is the sum of all the ground that the particular person has
covered for the entire day, but the displacement will still be zero, because it is a measure of the shortest
path between the person’s initial and final position. In this case, that person’s initial and final position
remains the same.

The distance will be equal to the displacement if that aforementioned person travels a straight line
without breaking that path and direction. If the person is a runway model for instance, and we were to
calculate their distance and displacement covered from one point on the narrow stage up to the final
point of the stage without returning, then the measure of the path covered will be equal for both
distance and displacement.

On the other hand, distance will never be less than the displacement. Displacement is defined literally as
the SHORTEST path covered form the initial and final position. The distance will always equal the
displacement no matter how long its path covers if we are dealing with a straight line.

However, and I might as well inform you that I would definitely sound like a Physics nerd and a hardcore
fan of science fiction --- if I were to still give a specific but HYPOTHETICAL, UTTERLY IMPLAUSIBLE, AND
HIGHLY FICTITIOUS situation where distance is less than the displacement that DOES NOT CORRELATE in
any aspect to our realities, perhaps no other piece of technology is as perfect as a Star Trek Transporter
Beam. The Transporter is a device that teleports a person from one planet or spaceship to another by
moving their information to the speed of light, “dematerializing” their matter, and combining them
again to its destination without the need for the person to move. I shall spare you the math, but if this
happens, then distance is less than the displacement because there was no ground covered, thus a zero
distance, but the person’s initial position and final position changed dramatically from their
displacement.

In reality though, dematerializing matter and breaking the binding energies and electric fields of which
holds our atoms together would require a great deal of energy; not to mention that we have to keep
ourselves alive during the process. With this, I say we stick to the fact that displacement will always be
equal or less.