![]() ![]() In practical situations, average speed usually comes up in the context of transportation, such as the average speed of a train or airplane during a trip. In physics, velocity measures something’s speed relative to its direction of motion. Speed is sometimes confused with velocity, but they are not the same. In everyday life, we just call this speed, which is what the speedometer in your car tells you-exactly how fast you’re going at that moment. (Others probably discussed the concept before that, but Galileo usually gets the credit.)Īverage speed should not be confused with instantaneous speed, which measures the speed of an object at a specific instant in time. It didn’t work (light is way too fast to be measured this way), but Galileo did come up with the formula distance/time = average speed. In the 1600s, physicist and astronomer Galileo Galilei tried to calculate the speed of light by measuring how long it would take a person to see a light from across a field. (Which means the next thing you’re going to have to calculate is how to pay the speeding ticket.)Īverage speed might seem like a basic, obvious concept, but for much of history, people didn’t have much of a practical need for such a calculation (plus there were no speedometers on horses). If you were to drive 200 miles in two hours, you could calculate your average speed by dividing the total distance (200 miles) by the total amount of time it took (two hours), giving an average speed of 100 miles per hour. Let’s slow down and start with an example. ![]()
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