this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2023
106 points (100.0% liked)
Science
13009 readers
13 users here now
Studies, research findings, and interesting tidbits from the ever-expanding scientific world.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
Be sure to also check out these other Fediverse science communities:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Thanks for the reply! I'm not sure I fully got that, though. So it seems to be that it's not actually about position (the absolute coordinates), but about the velocity of the particle? So, you could just always use a coordinate system that has the particle at its origin so that its position doesn't need to change, and just invert the vector of its velocity to get the same result?
Edit: Went over the Wikipedia article, I think that cleared it up a bit - it's not actually about a single particle being inverted in an otherwise unchanged system, but the whole system that you're observing being inverted, is that correct? In that case, it would actually not matter what point is chosen as the origin, as the relative positions of everything would work out to be the same no matter the origin of the inversion. That makes a bit more sense then.