Why does the spring compression satisfy a quadratic, and why does adding friction amount to just one substitution for sin θ?
Loading…
Both potential-energy zeros at the unstretched spring end
Write and with its negative gravitational term, and reduce to .
The physically meaningful root for the compression
Apply the quadratic formula and keep the positive root , noting the video's factored line prints where belongs.
Friction as the swap
Write over the travelled distance , show the energy equation reproduces the frictionless one under that replacement, and give the same expression as the energy lost.