We are now about to start a study of motion.  That part of physics which studies the description of motion is called kinematics.  We’ll be spending the next few chapters just trying to build up our expertise in describing the motion of various objects under different circumstances.  This will involve not only learning about the definitions of the so-called kinematic quantities,  but also learning about vector quantities along with vector arithmetic.

Once we complete our study of kinematics, we will then move on to a study of dynamics.  Dynamics is the study of why objects move the way they do — that is, we don’t just worry about describing the motion that an object is observed to have, but we also want to explain why it has the observed motion.

In this lecture, we will be introduced to the four kinematic quantities, as well as to the concepts of scalars and vectors.