Chapter 4, Problem 4.55P

DATA You are a Starfleet captain going boldly where no man has gone before. You land on a distant planet and visit an engineering testing lab. In one experiment a short, light rope is attached to the top of a block and a constant upward force F is applied to the free end of the rope. The block has mass m and is initially at rest. As F is varied, the time for the block, to move upward 8.00 m is measured. The values that you collected are given in the table:

F(N)	Time (s)
250	3.3
300	2.2
350	1.7
400	1.5
450	1.3
500	1. 2

(a) Plot F versus the acceleration a of the block. (b) Use your graph to determine the mass m of the block and the acceleration of gravity g at the surface of the planet. Note that even on that planet, measured values contain some experimental error.