Relative Motion in a Subway Station

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If you are on a subway train in a subway station, you can see people standing or sometimes walking in the aisles of another train; your train or the other train might be moving in either direction. Sometimes it is hard to say what is moving! This means that the motion of a body always depends on a particular frame of reference. Galileo was the first person to formalize this concept, which is known as relative motion.

Contributed by: Enrique Zeleny (March 2011)
Open content licensed under CC BY-NC-SA


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See "Kinematics", "Frame of Reference", and "Galilean Transformation" on Wikipedia.



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