What is inertia

Change is hard, we all know it. And we don’t mean that in a purely psychological sense. Did you know that is one of the fundamental laws of the universe? Resistance to change even has a name – inertia, and it’s a very important topic in physics. Let’s explore all about it in this super simple, but effective experiment. Article Contents People used to think that objects have a natural tendency to stop. If you want them to continue moving, you have to apply some kind of force again. And that is something that we can observe in everyday life as well. If we throw a ball, it won’t just keep on moving forever. It will fall down on the ground. Everything will stop eventually. But that notion was challenged in the 1600s by Galileo, and later, Newton and Descartes. Galileo was studying planetal orbits and noticed something strange. Objects will actually continue to move unless some force causes them to stop. This discovery helped to explain how is it possible that we don’t feel any motion even though Earth revolves around the Sun. We are moving together with Earth so from our perspective, it looks like it stands still. Sometimes we can observe a similar effect on a smooth ride. If we don’t see or hear anything, it would be hard to say if we are actually moving or standing. That new insight was called the Law of Inertia. Inertia is defined as the object’s tendency to continue doing what it was doing – if it was moving to continue to move and if it was resting to continue resting. Th...

When a mass moves further from the axis of rotation it becomes increasingly more difficult to change the rotational velocity of the system. Intuitively, this is because the mass is now carrying more momentum with it around the circle (due to the higher speed) and because the momentum vector is changing more quickly. Both of these effects depend on the distance from the axis. A motor capable of producing a constant torque of 100 N m 100~\mathrm 0 . 1 k g m 2 0, point, 1, space, k, g, m, squared . What angular acceleration will the flywheel experience as the motor is switched on? For more complicated shapes, it is generally necessary to use calculus to find the rotational inertia. However, for many common geometric shapes it is possible to find tables of equations for the rotational inertia in textbooks or other sources. These typically give the moment of inertia for a shape rotated about its centroid (which often corresponds with the shapes If the shape shown in Figure 5 is made by welding three 10 m m 10~\mathrm 1 0 0 k g 100, space, k, g . If rotated about a central axis (out of the page), what is the rotational inertia of the object? Rotational inertia is important in almost all physics problems that involve mass in rotational motion. It is used to calculate angular momentum and allows us to explain (via conservation of angular momentum) how rotational motion changes when the distribution of mass changes. It also is needed to find the energy which is stored as rotational...

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Physics is technically analogous to the contributions of Sir Isaac Newton. He is the man who revolutionised classical physics with his laws of motion. He propounded three laws of motion, and the first of these is related to inertia. But first, let us first understand the meaning of inertia. The term 'inertia' comes from the Latin word 'iners', which translates to lazy or idle. Johannes Kepler coined the term. The meaning of inertia is related to the fixed characteristic of an object made of matter. Inertia is a quality found in all things made of matter that have mass. An object made of matter keeps doing what it is doing until there is a force that changes its speed or direction. A ball on a table will not start rolling unless someone or something pushes it. It is noteworthy that if you toss a ball in a frictionless The measure of inertia is mass. Objects with a greater mass resist a change in their motion or rest more than objects with lower mass. For example, moving a truck will require more forceful pushes. On the contrary, moving a bike will require less aggressive impulses. This difference in force is because the truck and bike have different masses. A truck has more significant inertia than that of a motorcycle. The law of inertia is also known as Newton's First Law, it forms the basis of physics, it postulates that if an object is at rest or moving at a constant speed in a straight line will keep remaining at rest or will keep moving at the same speed unless it is ...

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Before Galileo and Newton, many people thought objects slowed down because they had a natural built in tendency to do so. But those people weren't taking into account the many forces—e.g., friction, gravity, and air resistance—here on Earth that cause objects to change their velocity. If we could observe the motion of an object in deep interstellar space, we would be able to observe the natural tendencies of an object's motion free from any external influences. In deep interstellar space, we would observe that if an object had a velocity, it would continue moving with that velocity until there was some force to cause a change in the motion. Similarly, if an object were at rest in interstellar space, it would remain at rest until there was a force to cause it to change its motion. Note the repeated use of the verb remains. We can think of this law as preserving the status quo of motion. Newton’s first law of motion states that there must be a cause—which is a net external force—for there to be any change in velocity, either a change in magnitude or direction. An object sliding across a table or floor slows down due to the net force of friction acting on the object. But on an air hockey table, where air keeps the puck from touching the table, the air hockey puck continues moving with a roughly constant velocity until a force acts on it—like when it bumps into the side of the table. An external force is a force originating from outside an object rather than a force internal t...