Modelling a spring:
- They can stretch or compress when a force is applied to them
- They can later go back to their original form
- The amount of force varies linearly with the distance
- Sping constant: , how much force is required to compress or stretch the spring
- There’s a limit to how much you can stretch or compress: elasticity limit
How can we obtain the spring constant? The classical experiment involves hanging a mass from the spring, and measuring before and after how much it stretches. From it, we can extrapolate the constant by plugging in numbers from the formula ().
In the real world, things are not perfectly calibrated. Maybe our measurements are not perfect, maybe the masses are not exact. To compensate for that, we make multiple measuresments through multiple trials and variations of the experiment.