When Does a Sliding Ladder Lose Contact With the Wall?
This started as a calculus problem. The question said that the top of a ladder moves down with some constant speed and asks about the speed of the contact point with the floor. You can see my solution here.
Of course my initial thought was not about derivatives of x and y, but instead I thought: I don’t think the top of a sliding ladder would move down with a constant speed. You know what comes next, right? Yes, a physics problem.
In fact, if you have a ladder on a frictionless floor leaning up against a frictionless wall (which is NOT OSHA approved), the ladder will actually slide down in such a way that it will lose contact with the wall at some point. So, let’s find the angle at which this happens — using physics. It’s going to be fun.
Forces on a Sliding Ladder
Without friction, there are just 3 forces that act on the ladder.
There’s the gravitational force pulling down at the center of mass and then there are the two contact forces — N1 from the wall pushing to the right and N2 from the floor pushing up. Oh, notice that if the ladder is leaning at an angle θ…
