The Essential Guide to Physics for Flash Games, Animation, and Simulations

Kinematics of uniform circular motion

In Chapter 4, we laid out the framework for describing motion using concepts such as displacement, velocity, and acceleration. As we said there, this framework is technically called kinematics. Those concepts sufficed to describe so-called linear or translational motion. But for analyzing circular or rotational motion, we need additional concepts.

In fact, the concepts of rotational kinematics can be developed in complete analogy with those of linear kinematics. For starters, we have rotational analogs of displacement, velocity, and acceleration that are called angular displacement, angular velocity, and angular acceleration, respectively. So let's start by looking at them.

Angular displacement

Recall that ...