Did this meme brake your brain?

Changing direction is not acceleration. You also experience inertia when changing directions.

No nead to frake out about it.

According to this physics website you're wrong

An object is accelerating if it is changing its velocity.

Velocity =/= speed

A change in direction is a change in velocity

Guess my physics professors back at university were wrong then ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Your lateral velocity is changing. Change in velocity = acceleration. In fact, you’re now traveling in a circle, which requires constant acceleration towards the center.

Did your physics professor say "velocity == speed"? Because if so, yes he was

You need to revisit the concept of centripetal acceleration. You are remembering incorrectly. Any change in the velocity vector is acceleration. That can be magnitude and/or direction.

Yes he was. You should ask for your money back. I don't know how you'd complete even intro physics getting this wrong, as the formulas all depend on it.

This is like high school physics - change in direction is a change in acceleration.

Even better, you can experience this directly - turn the wheel abruptly at a moderate speed - what you feel is called acceleration.

Changing direction by definition is an acceleration. If it wasn't, then all our math about planets, rockets getting to planets, etc, would be wrong.

A steering wheel could be called a "centripetal accelerator", since it induces acceleration toward the center of a radius/circle.

This is high school level physics, one of the first things you learn.

https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/centripetal-acceleration/

Acceleration is required to change the direction young padawan

Maybe it was a one-dimensional physics professor

Steering wheel Derivative of the vehicle’s angular velocity.

If they said that, yes, they were.

Face it, planets are hanging from the celestial ceiling - on wires. Galilei's herecy has been debunked. The end is nigh! Eat more sawdust! Ahoohaa!

My dude, velocity is a vector, if you accelerate a body in a perpendicular direction to its velocity, its velocity will change direction, but not magnitude.

Grab a yoyo, start spinning it around. You are constantly accelerating it towards your hand. If you stopped and let it loose, it would move in a straight line and break the window and mom would be sad.

No acceleration means constant speed in a straight line. If it does not go with constant speed in a straight line, it's being accelerated.

Yeah I think the guy above you has an argument though. The steering wheel only acts as an accelerator if the vehicle is actually in motion. But then the brake also does that, so maybe there is a point in naming them differently.

Lemme break it down for ya:

• Velocity is speed (magnitude) plus a direction (vector)
• Acceleration is a change in velocity, not speed. The magnitude doesn't have to change in order for there to be an acceleration.
• without steering input, your definition of acceleration would be correct, i.e. the acceleration vector will be in the same dimension as your direction of travel.
• Even if speed remains constant, a change of direction is a change in the vector, which may be n-dimensional.
• By virtue of your acknowledgement that there is a change of direction, you are also acknowledging that the body was acted upon by a force, since by newton's law, everything should remain constant otherwise.
• Changing heading means you introduce/ add a lateral vector into your original heading. If speed remains the same, the velocity in your original heading is actually reduced, even if your speed remains constant.
• The change of direction is introduced by the interaction of the tyres and the road. Now that the tires have turned, a lateral force is introduced due to them no longer turning along the axis of minimum rolling resistance. The car responds by following the path of least resistance, which should follow the incidence direction of the tyres. Believe it or not, due to energy loss at the tyres your car will actually slow down during the turn without throttle input.
• According to my buddy Newton, force experiences is equal to mass times acceleration
• The mass you pretty much know is the mass of the car. The lateral force/ acceleration wouldn't have happened without the steering.
• The image says physicists, so yes, this isn't as boring as it sounds, but it is an interesting thought experiment. Thanks for playing!

Doubt it, I'm going to go out on a limb and say either you didn't take university physics or you weren't paying attention, because like the other commenters said this isn't even university-level physics knowledge, it's highschool.

What have you done to those poor arrows?