Newton's laws of motion
Newton's First Law of Motion Basic primer on Newton's First Law of Motion
⇐ Use this menu to view and help create subtitles for this video in many different languages.
You'll probably want to hide YouTube's captions if using these subtitles.
- Human beings have always observed that is you have
- an object that is moving,
- so this is a moving object,
- traveling to the right here,
- that it seems to stop on it's own.
- That if you do nothing to this moving object,
- on it's own, this object is going to come to a stop.
- It is going to come to rest.
- And on the other side of things,
- if you want to keep an object moving,
- you have to keep applying a force to it.
- We've never in our everyday experience
- seen an object that just keeps moving
- on and on forever without anyone acting on it.
- It seems like something will always stop.
- And this is why, for most of human history,
- probably pre-history, but we definitely know the ancient Greeks
- all the way until the early 1600s,
- so for at least 2000 years,
- the assumption was "objects have a natural tendency to stop."
- Objects ... have ... tendency ... to come to rest or to stop.
- And if you want to keep them moving,
- you have to apply some type of a net force to it.
- And once again, this is completly consistent with
- everyday human experience,
- this is what we've all experienced our entire lives.
- But then these gentlemen show up in the 1600s,
- and you might be surprised to see three gentlemen here,
- because this is about Newton's first law of motion.
- And, indead, one of these gentlemen is
- Sir Isaac Newton.
- That's Newton right over there [middle].
- But these other too guys get at least as much credit for it
- because they actually described really what
- Newton's first Law describes,
- and they did it before Newton.
- This is Galileo.
- And this is Rene Descarts.
- And they describe it in different ways,
- and Newton frankly get's the credit for it
- because he really encapsulates into a broader framework
- with his other Laws, and the Laws of Gravitation,
- which was really the basics of classical mechanics,
- and seem to describe, at least until the 20th Century,
- most of how reality actually worked.
- And their big insight, and it was very unintuitive at the time,
- {so now we come to the 1600s}
- Is that these three gentlemen said,
- maybe it works the other way.
- Maybe objects have a tendency to maintain their velocity, their speed and their direction.
- And if their speed is zero, they'll maintain that restfulness.
- Unless they're acted upon by an unbalanced force.
- So the completly opposite way of thinking.
- For over 2000 years, objects tend to stop on their own,
- if you want to keep the movement, apply a force.
- These guys say,
- Objects hava tendency to maintain their motion forever
- and the only way that your going to stop them is
- if you act on it, or accelerate them, or change their velocity,
- so either their speed or direction some way,
- is to act on them with an unbalanced force.
- But you might be saying,
- Hey, come on Sal, what's going on?
- You just went through this,
- you said for most of most of human history,
- including my own personal history,
- this is what I observed [top right].
- How can these guys say that this thing has a tendency to
- go on forever?
- This seems to break down.
- And their big insight was,
- well, maybe these things don't have, by themselves,
- a tendency to stop, but because of interactions
- with their enviorment, forces are being generated
- that are acting against their motion.
- So when you think you're leaving this thing alone,
- there is actualy a net force that is trying to stop it.
- And in this particular example over here,
- the net force is the force of friction.
- It's the interaction between the block and the ground.
- So, when you think you're leaving this thing alone,
- you actually have a net force going against it's motion,
- which is the force of friction.
- And these guys realize that,
- because they said,
- look, if it was an innate property of the block,
- regardelss of the enviornment,
- it should kind of always come to a stop
- in maybe a similar way.
- But they saw, if you made this surface a little bit smoother
- this thing would travel further and further.
- Maybe if you eliminated this friction,
- if you made this surface completely friction-less,
- completely smooth, this thing indead would travel forever.
- And they didn't have the luxury of launching satilites,
- and doing things in deep space,
- so it was a very, very unintuitive thought experiment.
- And you might say, what about this other thing,
- what happens when I am applying the force?
- Becuase in my everyday life,
- If I want to drag my TV set across the room
- I apply a force to it.
- And what these guys would tell you
- is all you were doing,
- if you were keeping the velocity of that TV constant,
- all you were doing was counteracting this net negative force.
- So if this was a TV dragging across your carpet,
- this is the force of friction acting against the motion
- of the object,
- and so you are essentially just balancing it when you push it.
- If you balance it perfectly,
- you will be able to maintain it's velocity.
- If you want to accelerate it,
- you will have to apply even more force in the direction you are actually moving it.
- Many thanks to Sal! :)
Be specific, and indicate a time in the video:
At 5:31, how is the moon large enough to block the sun? Isn't the sun way larger?
|
Have something that's not a question about this content? |
This discussion area is not meant for answering homework questions.
Discuss the site
For general discussions about Khan Academy, visit our Reddit discussion page.
Flag inappropriate posts
Here are posts to avoid making. If you do encounter them, flag them for attention from our Guardians.
abuse
- disrespectful or offensive
- an advertisement
not helpful
- low quality
- not about the video topic
- soliciting votes or seeking badges
- a homework question
- a duplicate answer
- repeatedly making the same post
wrong category
- a tip or feedback in Questions
- a question in Tips & Feedback
- an answer that should be its own question
about the site
Share a tip
Suggest a fix
Have something that's not a tip or feedback about this content?
This discussion area is not meant for answering homework questions.