¶ Force Lines: Omnidirectional Lines of Force (1)
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Force Lines: Omnidirectional Lines of Force:
“One of the concepts of plane geometry goes along with something we are told quite early, when getting into physics, and that was that when we get the lines of force, when we get into the parallelogram of forces. We get Galileo’s concept of two ships running into each other. One ship: we will take what its weight is-- it is ten tons and it is making ten knots, so we will multiply ten tons times ten knots and it is going east so we have 10 x 10, which is 100. So we have a line 100 units long going east on the pattern on the map on the table here. Then we have another ship going 20 knots and weighing 20 tons so we multiply 20 x 20 and get 400. So we have a line 400 units long, instead of 100, and it is going north. We have these two ships run into each other, and by Galileo’s diagram of forces, we have two lines, one going east and one north. And we make two lines parallel to them of equal length. Then we make a diagonal from the point of running into each other to the opposite corner of the parallelogram, and we take that same line and extend it outwardly from the point and we said that that was the resultant of forces. This is a game we played on a plane. One thing that interested me very much when I”
