00:01
All right, so let's say we have a starship, which i'll just represent as a large box, and it has a mass of 2 million kilograms.
00:10
And it's pulling in a smaller ship that has a mass of 20 ,000 kilograms.
00:18
And it's initially at a distance of, let's see, 10 kilometers.
00:25
So we want to know how far will the larger ship move when they meet? pulling in, sorry, how far will they meet or how far will it move when they meet given that it's exerting a force of four times 10 to the fourth newtons via a tractor beam? so really, the net force on this system, ignoring the gravitational interaction between these two, is going to be zero.
00:52
And so what does that mean? it means that kind of the momentum is conserved.
00:56
But an easy way to think about this problem is very analogous to like having somebody, standing next to somebody else, pulling on like a rope that the other person is attached to, like in space or something like this.
01:08
As they pulled this person towards them with the rope, newton's third law says that they're also going to be pulled towards them.
01:14
So really what we can do is note that the center of mass does not change in this problem.
01:21
All right...
