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One may compare linear motion to general motion. In general motion, a particle's position and velocity are described by vectors, which have a magnitude and direction. In linear motion, the directions of all the vectors describing the system are equal and constant which means the objects move along the same axis and do not change direction.
All frames of reference with zero acceleration are in a state of constant rectilinear motion (straight-line motion) with respect to one another. In such a frame, an object with zero net force acting on it, is perceived to move with a constant velocity, or, equivalently, Newton's first law of motion holds. Such frames are known as inertial.
Rectilinear propagation describes the tendency of electromagnetic waves (light) to travel in a straight line. Light does not deviate when travelling through a homogeneous medium, which has the same refractive index throughout; otherwise, light experiences refraction.
In the simple case of a single particle moving with a constant velocity (thereby undergoing uniform linear motion), the action is the momentum of the particle times the distance it moves, added up along its path; equivalently, action is the difference between the particle's kinetic energy and its potential energy, times the duration for which ...
The red particle moves in a flowing fluid; its pathline is traced in red; the tip of the trail of blue ink released from the origin follows the particle, but unlike the static pathline (which records the earlier motion of the dot), ink released after the red dot departs continues to move up with the flow.
In physics and geometry, there are two closely related vector spaces, usually three-dimensional but in general of any finite dimension. Position space (also real space or coordinate space) is the set of all position vectors r in Euclidean space, and has dimensions of length; a position vector defines a point in space.
Maupertuis was the first to publish a principle of least action, as a way of adapting Fermat's principle for waves to a corpuscular (particle) theory of light. [ 3 ] : 96 Pierre de Fermat had explained Snell's law for the refraction of light by assuming light follows the path of shortest time , not distance.
However the total energy of the particle E and its relativistic momentum p are frame-dependent; relative motion between two frames causes the observers in those frames to measure different values of the particle's energy and momentum; one frame measures E and p, while the other frame measures E ′ and p ′, where E ′ ≠ E and p ′ ≠ p ...