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I often hear from the pool crowd that they don’t know how to swim. But when you’re trying to teach them, you have to be sure you teach them the right way to swim. The laws of motion are not as obvious as they seem. Here are five laws of motion that will help you teach your students how to swim.
1. The water starts at all points in its path, but it is always moving. When it hits a solid object it will stop, but it won’t actually stop.
So if you’re teaching swimming, you can’t just say, “Go into the water,” because it will be moving. You have to explain to them that the water isn’t actually stopping in its path, and that it is actually moving in a certain direction. But it is still moving.
The law of conservation of momentum is actually the same thing as the law of conservation of energy. Both of these are laws that tell you that the only way to have a situation that causes the water to move is for a force to act on it. In physics, momentum is an amount of energy. You can think of a force as being the difference between the kinetic energy of an object and the potential energy of the object.
Sure, if you think of a force as an object that’s pushing on something else, then you are actually describing the Law of Conservation of Energy. But the law of conservation of momentum is really the same thing as the law of conservation of energy. If you think of the universe as a big ball of fluid, then every instance of a change in the universe’s momentum will cause the ball to move in one direction or another.
The question of whether we can swim is not so different. If you want to swim and want to do it by which law of momentum, you have to swim in the direction that has the higher potential energy. So the law of conservation of momentum is the same thing as the law of conservation of energy in the universe. In both cases, you have to do it in the direction that has the higher potential energy, not the lower.
The reason why we can’t swim is that the universe has no time energy. So when it takes the universe a certain amount of time to do something, it has to do it in a certain direction. So if you’re in the center of the ball, when the universe takes a few seconds to do something, it has to do it in the direction that has the higher potential energy.
If you’re on the far side, it has to do it in the direction that has the lower potential energy. So if you’re at the bottom of the ball and the universe is taking a few seconds longer to do something, it has to do it in the direction that has the lower potential energy. But if you’re at the top of the ball, its taking forever, you have to do it in the direction that has the higher potential energy.
In fact if youre swimming in the same direction as the Universe, you have to do it in the direction that has the higher potential energy. If youre swimming in the opposite direction, you dont have to do anything.