Question

Who has greater displacement, an astronaut who has just completed an orbit of the earth or you when you have just traveled from home to school?

Answer 1

Answer:

Explanation:

This is going to sound like an absurd answer, but sometimes physics can be a little strange.

This answer is weird because of the definition of displacement. It means the distance from the starting point to the ending point, disregarding what happened in between. The point is that the astronaut is at the starting point of his orbit. By definition the starting and ending points are the same. His displacement is 0.

So the answer is you have the greater displacement when you walked one way to school.  The starting point and the ending point are different. You have gone further.

However just to make things a little nasty, when you walk home again, your displacement will be the same as the astronaut's -- 0 meters because you will be right back where you started from.