Angular Momentum and the Moment of Inertia Tensor

Photo: Rhett Allain

I want to explain this cool problem, but I want to sort of give a rough outline of how to get there. It’s useful to see where things start and where they end up.

Point Masses

When you start off in your physics course, you use point masses. Oh, you don’t necessarily call them point masses — but that’s what they are. When you model a block sliding down a…