How long is a second squared

Try spraying your plants and flowers with water and then sprinkling on pepper or peppermint oil to deter squirrels. Begin typing your search term above and press enter to search. Press ESC to cancel. Skip to content Home Physics What does the 2 mean in acceleration? Ben Davis January 1, What does the 2 mean in acceleration? What do you mean by an acceleration of 5 m s2? What do you mean by acceleration of a body 10m s2?

What is N in KG? What is kg in Newtons? How do you convert mass to Newtons without acceleration? How many feet do you fall in a second? How long would it take for a person to fall feet? How long would it take to fall feet? How fast can you hit the ground and survive? Do squirrels ever fall to their death?

Will squirrels starve if I stop feeding them? Now you feel just how much force it takes to accelerate the rock away from straight flight. Of course most accelerations don't have the uniformity of gravity. A rising elevator accelerates at first, and we feel our weight increase by a few pounds. When we decelerate at the 18th floor, our weight drops just a tad. That can be a nice feeling. But too many people don't get it -- like motorists who tailgate or don't slow down for a curve on an icy road.

Acceleration can deceive us. That's why Isaac Newton, who first explained how force and acceleration are related, was also an inventor of calculus -- that special language for explaining how things change in time and space.

Acceleration is so much clearer when we have that new language to describe it. And I hear echoes of a fine old saying about the language of math: "Mathematics lets fools do what only geniuses could do without it. I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston, where we're interested in the way inventive minds work. For these formulae to work properly, the units must be consistent. Express everything either in feet and seconds or in meters and seconds. The acceleration of gravity is Lienhard Click here for audio of Episode How long does it take for the car to stop?

Throughout this section, we have been considering motion in a straight line with constant acceleration. This situation is very common; for example, a body moving under the influence of gravity travels with a constant acceleration. There are five frequently used formulas for motion in a straight line with constant acceleration.

Of course, they require consistent systems of units to be used. If the values of three of the variables are known, then the remaining values can be found by using two of the equations.

More simply:. We can derive this equation using the fact that the displacement is equal to the signed area under the velocity—time graph. For the velocity—time graph on the left, the region under the graph is a trapezium. So the second equation of motion holds in this case. One of the triangles has positive signed area and the other has negative signed area. Finding the displacement of a particle from the velocity—time graph using integration will be discussed in a later section of this module.

Substituting this into the second equation gives. Derive the third and fifth equations of motion from a velocity—time graph. Motion due to gravity is a good context in which to demonstrate the use of the constant-acceleration formulas. As discussed earlier, our two directions in vertical motion are up and down, and a decision has to be made as to which of the two directions is positive.

Use this value in the following exercise. A man dives from a springboard where his centre of gravity is initially 12 metres above the water, and his initial velocity is 4.