A ball of mass m hangs on a thread fastened at point O. With what acceleration and in what direction should this point be displaced for the tension in the thread to be equal to half of the weight of the ball?

Question

anonymous · Answer

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xishem · Answer

Alright, so a reasonable thing to do first would be to find the tension as a function of the acceleration. Any ideas on how to approach that?

xishem · Answer

Try drawing a free-body diagram of the system while point O is accelerating.