21: Circular Motion and Planetary Motion
Suppose that you were driving a car with the steering wheel turned in such a manner that your car followed the path of a perfect circle with a constant radius. And suppose that as you drove, your speedometer maintained a constant reading of 10 mi/hr. In such a situation as this, the motion of your car could be described as experiencing uniform circular motion. Uniform circular motion is the motion...
22: Work, Energy and Power
When a force acts upon an object to cause a displacement of the object, it is said that work was done upon the object. There are three key ingredients to work force, displacement, and cause. In order for a force to qualify as having done work on an object, there must be a displacement and the force must cause the displacement. Read the following five statements to understand the concept of work. S...
23: Momentum and Its Conservation
Momentum refers to the quanity of motion that an object has. Momentum can be defined as "mass in motion." All objects have mass; so if an object is moving, than it has momentum-it has its mass in motion. The amount of momentum which an object has is dependent upon two variables: how much stuff is moving and how fast the stuff is moving. Momentum depends upon the variables mass and velocity. In te...
24: Newton's Laws of Motion
The focus here is Newton's first law of motion - sometimes referred to as the law of inertia. Newton's first law of motion is often stated as : An object at rest tends to stay at rest and an object in motion tends to stay in motion with the same speed and in the same direction-unless acted upon by an unbalanced force. Everyday Applications of Newton's First Law There are many applications of N...
25: One Dimensional Motion
Physics concerns intself with a variety of broad topics. One such topic is mechanics - the study of the motion of objects Kinematics is the science of describing the motion of objects using words, diagrams, numbers, graphs, and equations. Kinematics is a branch of mechanics. The goal of any study of kinematics is to develop sophisticated mental models which serve to describe (and ultimately, expl...