While the car accelerates forward, the coffee remains in the same position subsequently, the car accelerates out from under the coffee and the coffee spills in your lap. Have you ever observed the behavior of coffee in a coffee cup filled to the rim while starting a car from rest or while bringing a car to rest from a state of motion? Coffee "keeps on doing what it is doing." When you accelerate a car from rest, the road provides an unbalanced force on the spinning wheels to push the car forward yet the coffee (that was at rest) wants to stay at rest. Consider some of your experiences in an automobile. There are many applications of Newton's first law of motion. The behavior of the water during the lap around the track can be explained by Newton's first law of motion.Įveryday Applications of Newton's First Law The container was forced to move in a different direction to make it around a curve the water kept moving in the same direction and spilled over its edge. The container was stopped near the finish line the water kept moving and spilled over container's leading edge. The water tended to "keep on doing what it was doing." The container was moved from rest to a high speed at the starting line the water remained at rest and spilled onto the table. The water resisted this change in its own state of motion.
The water spills whenever the state of motion of the container is changed. the container was moving in one direction and you attempted to change its direction.
The behavior of all objects can be described by saying that objects tend to "keep on doing what they're doing" ( unless acted upon by an unbalanced force). The two parts are summarized in the following diagram. There are two clauses or parts to this statement - one that predicts the behavior of stationary objects and the other that predicts the behavior of moving objects. Newton's first law of motion is often stated as An object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion stays in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force. The focus of Lesson 1 is Newton's first law of motion - sometimes referred to as the law of inertia. These three laws have become known as Newton's three laws of motion. Isaac Newton (a 17th century scientist) put forth a variety of laws that explain why objects move (or don't move) as they do. In this unit (Newton's Laws of Motion), the ways in which motion can be explained will be discussed. In a previous chapter of study, the variety of ways by which motion can be described (words, graphs, diagrams, numbers, etc.) was discussed.