20.3 Work by a Non-Constant Force

[@NoxuzBlog]

fancy glassboard

[@qedmath1729]

Very thorough! Thanks.

[@cafe-tomate]

The lim he takes is not the right one, more generally his definition of integral is ill-defined. He has (at least) two options to define the integral (with the mesh "tending to 0" or with the partitions getting finer and finer).

[@BTWPhysics]

Work is not the product of force and displacement to begin with. The total work is not the sum of all the scalar quantities because work is not a scalar.

[@samed3554]

work is scalar

[@BTWPhysics]

​@@samed3554 That's incorrect

[@BTWPhysics]

@@samed3554 Work is a vector

[@Zarqus99]

@@BTWPhysics lmao. Quoting my CS professor, "you're straight from the university of the streets". Work is scalar because it's a dot product, which by definition corresponds to a scalar quantity.

[@BTWPhysics]

@@Zarqus99 Your professor must be a Papoose fan maybe, but what's really funny is that the joke is actually on you and you just don't know it. Work is not really a scalar because you don't take the dot product of two vectors to get it. Let's start with what work is. What is your definition of work?

[@chowdhury_kamruzzaman]

I think the summation extends from 0 to n-1 not 1 to n!

[@Postermaestro]

no, in his model the first segment is x_1, not x_0