Copyright © Michael Richmond.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
Recall that we can write the components of the center of mass of a collection of objects in a compact way:
The sum on the bottom is simply the total mass of all the objects put together. Let's write that as capital M.
Okay, now you take it from here.
Q: Rewrite these three equations so that the total mass M
is on the left-hand side.
Q: Can you write a single vector formula which has the
center of mass coordinates on the left-hand side?
You should end up with something like this:
Concentrate on the X-component of each side. If we take the derivative with respect to time of each side, we get something that looks like this:
Copyright © Michael Richmond.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.