Newton’s Laws of Motion are one of the basic fundamentals of science. They are something that we all learn when we are in school and something that is throughout our world. Comedians joke about them and scientists use them to prove new theories everyday. Here is a look at them in simple terms.
The first Law of Motion is usually paraphrased into the sentence “An object will stay at rest or continue at a constant velocity unless acted upon by an external unbalanced force.”
This basically means that an object will either not move unless it is moved by something else, or that it will stay moving the same speed unless something else moves it.
So basically if you threw a ball into the air it will have the same velocity going up the entire time, unless it hit something. Then the ball would not have the same velocity as before.
This law explains why a bowling ball will fall at the same velocity as a feather. Even though the bowling ball is a lot heavier, they will fall at the same velocity because of gravity.
The second Law of Motion states that “the net force on an object is equal to the mass of the object multiplied by its acceleration.” This law only works for speeds less than the speed of light. The speed of light has a whole different set of rules.
The second Law means that if you punched someone, however hard you punched them, they would feel that energy plus how fast you were punching them. So all the energy you put into that punch, they would still feel more than that.
The third Law of Motion is paraphrased into the saying “for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.” This law applies to forces that are opposite of each other. It has to involve two different people or things. You do one thing and because of that thing something else happens.
For example, if you put a couple of dominos up, you push one with your finger and then that one hits the next one. The force that you pushed that domino with is the same amount of force that the first domino hit the second one with. You hit the one domino and the other domino uses the force it was hit with to hit another one. That’s how dominos can keep going and going. They don’t stop unless there is nothing there to hit except the table. The force is then transferred to the table.
The force may seem to weaken, but it doesn’t. The object has mass and so uses that mass against the other object. The forces are the same but in different directions.
If you still are having trouble understanding the Laws of Motion and all they contain, there are many books on it and many websites. You can also talk to your teachers at school. There is a lot more to the Law of Motion than what I have described here, but that would take novels. These are the basics to the Laws of Motion.
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