Q.A stone tied to a string is being whirled in a circle around a rod (peg); as it winds up, the string wraps around the rod and its free length keeps decreasing. In this process, which quantity remains conserved?
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Start your 14-day free trial to unlock the full solution →The stone's speed, and therefore its kinetic energy, remains constant because the string tension is always perpendicular to the velocity and does no work; angular momentum about the fixed axis is NOT conserved here since the effective radius keeps shrinking while the speed stays the same.
As the stone winds around the peg, at every instant its path is a curve (an involute of the peg's circle) and the string is tangent to the peg at the point where it currently leaves the peg. The stone's instantaneous velocity is always perpendicular to the (locally straight) string, because the string is the only thing constraining its motion and it can only pull, never push.
A force that is always perpendicular to the velocity of a particle does zero work on it (dW = F.v dt = 0, since F is perpendicular to v). So the tension does no work on the stone as it winds in — the stone's speed does not change, and hence its kinetic energy remains constant throughout the process.
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