I decided to raise my regular household car with a sports car say Ferrari well clearly it's no match for me it has a very high top speed but what if we both agree for the sake of this race to limit our top speed to say 80 miles an hour now do you think I have a fair shot of winning well let's find out three two one oh no why did that happen we have the same top speed right well let's look at this speedometer and see if that uses a clue so let's try that again do you see what happened well even though we bought you can see the sports car was able to pick up that speed much more quickly than my car this idea of how quickly you can speed up or how quickly you can pick up speed is the idea of acceleration and so although we both have the same top speed Ferrari or any sports car for that matter has a much higher has a much higher acceleration than regular cars and that's why it was able to extend that lead so how do we Define acceleration well in physics in general acceleration is defined as the rate of change in velocity in other words it's a measure of how quickly your velocity is changing and we'll take a lot of examples to make this clear but mathematically this means acceleration equals the change in velocity the Delta represents the change in V is the velocity change in velocity divided by the time taken for the change and so this will then equal how do you calculate the change in velocity well change in any quantity is usually calculated as the final value minus the initial value divided by the time taken for that change now in the case of Ferrari let's say it took about two seconds to reach the 80 miles an hour and my car took a lot of time I don't know maybe it took about 10 seconds or maybe even more but let's say 10 seconds so let's calculate quickly what will be their acceleration so the acceleration of the Ferrari would be the final velocity of the Ferrari that is 80 miles an hour minus the initial will start from zero divide by two seconds that gives us 40. miles per hour per second and similarly what would be the acceleration of my car I'm just going to call it as M for my car well even here the change in velocity is the same it goes from 0 to 80 but it takes about 10 seconds to do that and so that gives us about eight miles per hour per second so look even though both cars have the same change in velocity Ferrari is able to change that velocity much more quickly giving it a higher acceleration and that's what it's that's what this number says it says per second Ferrari picks up about 40 miles per hour velocity whereas my car per second only picks about 8 miles per hour of velocity so now let's see why acceleration was so tricky for me first and foremost miles and R is not the standard unit the standard unit is meters per second so if I convert this 40 miles per hour it turns out to be about 18 meters per second don't worry about the conversion in this video we'll tackle that separately but that means the acceleration in the standard terms becomes 18 meters per second per second again what does it say now it's saying that every second my Ferrari is picking up a velocity of 18 meters per second and so if we simplify the unit it then becomes meters per second squared and that's not very intuitive right what is meters per second Square should always remember it is meters per second per second and the same is the case over here eight miles an hour if I convert it to meters per second it gives me about 3. 6 meters per second so that is 3.
6 its velocity increases by 3. 6 meters per second per second or again I can say it is 3.
