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I have a doubt in understanding the intuition behind the concept of work. First

ID: 1392392 • Letter: I

Question

I have a doubt in understanding the intuition behind the concept of work. First of all, I think this isn't duplicate, I've searched on the site, and the closest thing I've found was this post which is different than what I'm struggling here to understand.

Well, let me show an example of what I mean: momentum. For me, defining the "quantity of motion" to be p=mv is pretty obvious, the amount of motion should be proportional to how fast the thing is moving and how much thing that's making the movement. Position, velocity, acceleration, those all have obvious interpretations too. But what about work ?

I've already heard that "work is the amount of force that was used to make the movement", however, if that's the case, shouldn't we define work simply as the component of the force in the direction of movement ? Why do we multiply by distance ? In other words, how do we get a "feeling" of what's work intuitively so that the equation defining it simply states mathematically our intuition ?

Thanks very much in advance

Explanation / Answer

If you want a lengthy-but-most-thorough answer, the link that Dan posted with his comment will help out a lot. However, since you're appealing to intuition (and I believe that training one's intuition is very important in learning physics) I'll try to give a simpler answer. I won't do quite as well, but here we go:

First, like it's been said, it's not correct to say that "work is the amount of force that was used to make the movement." Work is the amount of energy used to make the movement. To understand this intuitively, it sometimes helps to think about how the motion could move the object up