How do I find displacement?

The displacement is just the distance between the starting point and the ending point, and you don't care about the route taken or the actual distance covered along the way.
This can bite you sometimes. For example, some day you'll be given the diameter of a circle, and you'll be asked for the displacement of an ant that walks around the circle 17 times and finally stops at the same place it started from. You might go to work calculating the circumference of the circle and multiplying it by 17. But if you think about it first, you realize that if the ant ends up at the place he started from, then his displacement is zero.

Answered by AL2006 | 2024-06-10

Displacement is the straight-line distance between a starting point and an ending point, considering direction. To find it, measure the distance from the initial to the final position and use the formula Δ x = x f ​ − x i ​ . Displacement can be zero if the starting and ending point are the same, regardless of the distance traveled.
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Answered by AL2006 | 2024-12-26