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Problems involving rotating systems analyzed from an inertial frame, withoutinvoking fictitious forces, is something that freshman students find difficultto understand in an introductory mechanics course. One of the problems that Iworkout in my intermediate mechanics class (which has students majoring inphysics as well as students majoring in engineering and other sciencedisciplines) is that of a bead sliding freely on a rod that is rotatinguniformly in a horizontal plane. The motivation for working out this problemare two fold: (i) to train students in setting up Newton's equations of motionby identifying force components and equating to the corresponding mass timesaccelerations and (ii) to make the students familiar with the expressions foracceleration in the polar coordinates that we introduce at the beginning of thecourse. After guiding them through the solution which predicts an eventualradially outward motion for the bead (except for a very special initialcondition), a typical question that gets asked is the following: The math isall fine sir, but how does the bead that is initially at rest at some point onthe rod manage to move radially out if there are no radial forces? This articleis about the ways I have tried to answer this question over the years and helpstudents understand physics of the problem better.

Bead moving on a uniformly rotating rod studied from an inertial reference frame: Common misconceptions and possible ways to address them