The Concept of a Model

To understand a physical object, situation or process, we often must resort to studying a model since many of the things we want to study are too small, large, far away, dangerous, tenuous, etc., to work with directly. What is a model? It is an object, diagram, set of equations, etc., that somehow captures properties of the original.

Your assignment is to think about how some ordinary objects, such as those in the list below, could be used as models of other objects, situations or processes in your discipline.

• a rope
• a ball
• a stick