As you can imagine some of the equations we delt with previously
concerning the relationship between position, velocity, and acceleration
can be readily generalized to vector equations.
There are basically two ways of dealing with equations involving
vectors in physics. We can either work geometrically looking at the
corresponding vector diagrams. This method is perhaps less methodical
but nonetheless can be extremely powerful. The sure fire
way is to resolve the vector equation into its components
along the directions of a chosen coordinate system.
When we do this a vector equation basically becomes a short hand
for N scalar equations for each of the components of the vector. For example
the vector equation
is equivalent to
