My Buddy Newton

We have just finished studying Newton's first three laws of motion. Overall I have enjoyed this unit and liked being able to draw more free body diagrams.

I learned that the first law states "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." In other words, when the forces of an object are in equilibrium, the objects will keep doing what they're doing unless a force unbalances the object. The resistance of an object to change is called inertia. Basically, objects are pretty stubborn. Force is a vector quantity (magnitude and direction) that is measured in Newtons. I wish I could name something after myself. To solve equations, you add up all the forces in the Y and the X axis and solve for the unknown. Because the object is in equilibrium (not moving or velocity is constant), it's not to hard to solve for the unknown because the forces add to zero. Where I did have trouble is when the object is at an angle or on a ramp because I kept assuming that the force of gravity was still in the Y axis, instead of shifting the axis, which made the problems nearly impossible to do.

The third law states that when one object exerts a force on another object, the second object exerts on the first an equal force in the opposite direction. Every force (action force) has a reaction force. So, if you're standing on the ground, the ground is also pushing up on you. This concept wasn't difficult for me to understand.

The second law states that for a particular force, the acceleration of an object is proportional to the net force and inversely proportional to the mass of the object. In human-speak, the sum of the forces equals mass times acceleration. It wasn't too hard to plug in the numbers for that, but I was super confused until I realised that the forces were no longer in equilibrium, so I don't solve them the same way. Whichever direction has acceleration doesn't equal zero, it equals mass times acceleration. Once I understood this, I could solve the problems with ease.

Another difficulty in this unit was absence. I got the stomach flu for all last week and had to catch up, so this provided a disadvantage.

Overall, this unit was definitely not the most difficult to understand, though it still provided challenge. I enjoyed the unit a lot.