The goal for today is to better understand what we mean by terms such as velocity, speed, acceleration, and deceleration. Let’s start with an example, namely the motion of a ball thrown upward and then acted upon by gravity.
A major source of confusion in problems of this sort has to do with blurring the distinction between speed and velocity. The speed s is, by definition, the magnitude of the velocity vector: s := |v|. Note the contrast:
| – velocity – | – speed – |
| The change in velocity is uniformly downward. | The speed is decreasing during the upward trajectory, and increasing during the subsequent downward trajectory. |
The laws of physics are most simply written in terms of velocity, not speed.
Physics uses a technical definition of acceleration that conflicts with ordinary vernacular use of the words “acceleration” and “deceleration”. That’s tough. You’ll have to get used to it if you want to do physics.
| In physics, acceleration refers to a change in velocity, not speed. If you want to be really explicit, you can call this the vector acceleration. | In the vernacular, “acceleration” commonly means speeding up. If you insist on using the word in this sense, you can remove the ambiguity by calling it the scalar acceleration. The scalar acceleration can be considered one component of the vector acceleration, namely the projection in the “forward” direction (although this is undefined if the object is at rest). |
| In physics, the word “deceleration” is not much used. In particular, it is not the opposite of acceleration, or the negative of acceleration. Any change in velocity is called an acceleration. | In the vernacular, “deceleration” commonly means slowing down, i.e. a decrease in speed. |
Often the best way to describe a decrease in speed is to speak of slowing down. In physics, acceleration has to do with velocity, while speeding up has to do with speed. Don’t get these mixed up.
And no matter what terminology you use, it is almost always a bad idea to formulate physics problems in terms of speed, so you should stick to describing motion in terms of the vectors: position, velocity, and acceleration.
Specifically, in the case of the ball moving under the influence of gravity, it would be unwise and unhelpful (although possible) to use scalar “acceleration” ideas. Using scalar ideas, you could say the ball “decelerates” on the way up and “accelerates” on the way down. That’s literally true, but unhelpfully suggests that the physics is different on the way up and on the way down. (For more about the physics of weight and gravity, see reference 1.) It would be much better to analyze the problem in terms of velocity (not speed), and to use the physics definition of acceleration, i.e. the vector acceleration. The vector acceleration is the same throughout the flight, i.e. it is a downward-pointing vector.
To repeat: In physics, the term acceleration is defined to be the change in velocity, per unit time. It is a vector. This term applies no matter how the acceleration is oriented relative to the initial velocity. There are several possible orientations. The following table shows how to convert vector language to scalar language in each case:
| – Vector language – | – Corresponding scalar language – |
| Acceleration in the same direction as the velocity. | Speeding up. |
| Acceleration directly opposite to the velocity. | Slowing down. |
| Acceleration at right angles to the velocity. (This results in uniform circular motion, assuming the magnitude of the acceleration remains constant, and the direction remains perpendicular to the velocity.) | Constant speed. (This is a classic example of a situation where the scalar acceleration is zero even though the vector acceleration is nonzero.) |
| Acceleration at some odd angle relative to the velocity. | No good way to describe it in terms of scalars. |
| Acceleration of an object at a moment when its velocity is zero. | No way to describe it in terms of scalars; the scalar acceleration formula produces bogus expressions of the form 0/0. |
A much more technical discussion of acceleration, including a discussion of how things accelerate when they are already moving at nearly the speed of light, see reference 2.