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Sort of. The point of a ball on the end of a string is that you can simplify the system and ignore the elasticity of a string, air resistance, etc. It's a point mass (the ball) on the end of a light inelastic string.
But if I recall my ancient physics A level, normally model strings are massless and transmit forces between masses. This model doesn't seem to follow this convention by having a string with mass - what's the physicist's equivalent to a programmer's 'code smell'?
If you take away the ball then you have to come up with something that is the mass at the end of the string. The natural thing would be to consider splitting the string into two halves
This seems to complicate rather than simplify and again- why not model the whole thing as a single rotating body? I think it's wrong to think of an 'anchor point' in the inertial frame, it's just the centre of rotation of the system, where there are no resultant forces - can't be, as it's not moving.
The natural thing would be to consider splitting the string into two halves, and that the half furthest from the anchor point is a mass that replaces the ball for the sake of the setup.
I suspect this is a trap - as soon as you start focusing on components of the system, you are constructing a non-inertial frame.
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chez_jay
Sort of. The point of a ball on the end of a string is that you can simplify the system and ignore the elasticity of a string, air resistance, etc. It's a point mass (the ball) on the end of a light inelastic string.
If you take away the ball then you have to come up with something that is the mass at the end of the string. The natural thing would be to consider splitting the string into two halves, and that the half furthest from the anchor point is a mass that replaces the ball for the sake of the setup.