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High school physics - NGSS
Course: High school physics - NGSS > Unit 1
Lesson 1: Force, mass, and accelerationApplying Newton's first law of motion
Newton's first law quiz
1. If the net force on an object is zero, its velocity won't change. (True)
2. An unbalanced force on an object will always impact the object's speed. (False)
3. Moving objects come to rest in everyday life because of unbalanced forces. (True)
4. An unbalanced force on an object will always change the object's direction. (False). Created by Sal Khan.
1. If the net force on an object is zero, its velocity won't change. (True)
2. An unbalanced force on an object will always impact the object's speed. (False)
3. Moving objects come to rest in everyday life because of unbalanced forces. (True)
4. An unbalanced force on an object will always change the object's direction. (False). Created by Sal Khan.
Want to join the conversation?
- For statement #3, does LIGHT also apply?
And what about radio waves, microwaves, etc. ?(184 votes)- Light is a bit tricky and although Newton did a lot to advance our understanding of light and optics on a basic level, you'll find out that its actual behavior isn't described by Newtonian physics. For example, Newton discovered that white light is composed of all the colors in the visible spectrum (he actually didn't know anything about invisible light, such as radio waves, microwaves, X-rays, etc) , but he had no good way of knowing the speed of light or what it is made up of. Today we know light is made up of things that have no mass called photons that act as both waves and particles depending on how they are observed. That alone can't be modeled by Newton's laws of motion and it's a pretty hard concept for anyone to really understand. Newton actually argued that light was made up of just particles. He wasn't aware of light's wave properties. Things like photons were first modeled in detail by quantum mechanics and the whole idea that photons are at once both waves and particles also came out of quantum mechanics.
Another thing Newton didn't know about was that light also always moves at the same speed regardless of your frame of reference, which come to think of it doesn't make sense. You would think that if you were moving fast enough, light would appear to move slower next to you, but it never does! Also, as it turns out from Einstein's equations, Newton's laws of motion can't be used to describe anything at the speed of light or anything approaching such a speed. Therefore, light can't be modeled by Newton's 1st law of motion or any of the 3 laws of motion. These sorts of problems related to the speed of light as well as what happens when something approaches the speed of light weren't really dealt with until Einstein formulated his Theory of Relativity.
So as you can see, the actual behavior of light is described by two branches of physics that didn't develop until the 20th century--- quantum mechanics, and Einstein's theory of relativity.
One last thing, microwaves radiowaves, etc, are light except at much longer wavelengths (lower frequencies) than visible colors, while UV light, X-rays, and gamma rays are light with higher frequencies than visual light. In fact, the type of light we can see and that we think of as light, is really a rather small sliver in a much broader spectrum. Note that wavelengths and frequencies are properties that result from the wave aspect of light's behavior.(342 votes)
- My teacher says that objects like the moon are in free fall, but why does it stay put and just rotate around the Earth? Is it like a vacuum or is it just the gravity is stronger than the free fall?(30 votes)
- The moon is in the earths pull. the reason the moon is not falling toward us is because it is not in the super high gravitational pull it is not in our atmosphere but if it was it would be falling toward us to end humanity.(8 votes)
- What is the difference between speed and velocity? I thought both were the same thing.(12 votes)
- Speed and Velocity are quite different. Speed is a scalar quantity, i.e it has only magnitude but no direction. Therefore, Speed = distance/time.
But Velocity is a vector quantity, i.e. it has both magnitude and direction. Therefore, Velocity = displacement/time.
I highlighted distance and displacement because, distance is scalar and displacement is a vector.(26 votes)
- What exactly do we mean by an unblanced force??.....
It counteracts with Newton's third law of motion i.e. every action has an equal and opposite reaction
Sorry...the question may be a little stupid, but not enough to defeat my cuiosity .(8 votes)- The law about equal but opposite forces says that if you apply a force on something that it applies an equal but opposite force on you. The 2 forces are on different objects. When you are talking about unbalanced forces you are talking about the sum of forces on 1 object.
For example if you are pushing a block of wood across a table to the left so that it accelerates you have a force from gravity on the block down, a force from the table pushing up and you pushing left and the force of friction to the right. If the sum of these 4 forces leaves an amount to the left they are unbalanced and the block is accelerating to the left.
Newtons 3rd law would say that there is also a force up on the earth from the block, a force down on the table from the block, to the right on your hand from the block and to the left on the table from friction. All these forces are not on the same object so they can't be added.(21 votes)
- But doesn't friction decrease the magnitude of velocity i.e, speed? And friction is unbalanced. So how in the world doesn't an unbalanced force change the speed??(6 votes)
- The key word is always. An unbalanced force can change the object's speed but it can also change an its direction without changing its speed. So an unbalanced force does not always change the object's speed.(11 votes)
- How fast is a tutle?(1 vote)
- as fast as a tutle is.(12 votes)
- What does 'velocity' mean?(1 vote)
- Remember not to confuse "velocity" with speed!
In physics, velocity is a vector which means that the value of velocity can be negative, whereas "speed" is a scalar (it only gives the value, without direction) and therefore, can be only positive.
For example, if two cars are getting closer to each other (they are driving in opposite direction), we can say that the velocity of one of them is equal to 20m/s and the other one: -30m/s (minus sign because of the opposite direction), but their speed can be only positive so it is 20m/s and 30m/s respectively.(6 votes)
- 2:18
That part didn't make 'complete intuitive sense' to me at all(4 votes) - at, sal says if it was velocity instead of speed,statment 02 would be right..i donot get.does anyone please explain? 2:05(5 votes)
- When an unbalanced force acts upon an object, it impacts its speed and not its velocity because if anything is moving in a circular motion, and suddenly it stops moving, though the speed will be the same, but instead of stopping in a circular direction, its direction turns in a way it makes it stop moving and we know that if the direction changes the velocity turns to zero.(2 votes)
- OK, so the Newton's first law of motion states that a moving object will continue to be in the state of motion at the same speed unless a force is applied on it to change it's speed, right?
So, what happen when change the speed of the ceiling fan to bring it up to a specific speed, that too, in gravity?(2 votes)- Even when you bring the fan to a constant velocity(where it should continue moving endlessly), the fan will not do so(it will stop), all due to the air present which will create friction(an unbalanced force) and stop the fan. If this was the case in vaccum, due to absence of friction, when the fan gets to a constant velocity, it will continue moving
endlessly. BUT even so, the fan will experience friction in its coil hence making M.Efficiency<100%.(2 votes)
Video transcript
Now that we know a little
bit about Newton's First Law, let's give ourselves
a little quiz. And what I want you
to do is figure out which of these statements
are actually true. And our first statement is,
"If the net force on a body is zero, its velocity
will not change." Interesting. Statement number two, "An
unbalanced force on a body will always impact
the object's speed." Also an interesting statement. Statement number
three, "The reason why initially
moving objects tend to come to rest in
our everyday life is because they are being
acted on by unbalanced forces." And statement four, "An
unbalanced force on an object will always change the
object's direction." So I'll let you
think about that. So let's think about these
statement by statement. So our first statement
right over here, "If the net force
on a body is zero, its velocity will not change." This is absolutely true. This is actually
even another way of rephrasing
Newton's First Law. If I have some type
of object that's just traveling through
space with some velocity-- so it has some speed
going in some direction, and maybe it's deep space. And we can just,
for purity, assume that there's no
gravitational interactions. There will always be
some minuscule ones, but we'll assume no
gravitational interactions. Absolutely no
particles that it's bumping into, absolute
vacuum of space. This thing will
travel on forever. Its velocity will not change. Neither its speed nor its
direction will change. So this one is absolutely true. Statement number two, "An
unbalanced force on a body will always impact
the object's speed." And the key word right
over here is "speed." If I had written "impact
the object's velocity," then this would be a true statement. An unbalanced force
on a body will always impact the object's velocity. That would be true. But we wrote "speed" here. Speed is the
magnitude of velocity. It does not take into
account the direction. And to see why this
second statement is false, you could think about
a couple of things. And we'll do more
videos on the intuition of centripetal acceleration
and centripetal forces, inward forces,
if this does not make complete intuitive sense
to you just at this moment. But imagine we're looking at
an ice skating rink from above. And you have an ice skater. This is the ice skater's head. And they are traveling
in that direction. Now imagine right
at that moment, they grab a rope that is
nailed to a stake in the ice skating rink right over there. We're viewing all of this from
above, and this right over here is the rope. Now what is going to happen? Well, the skater
is going to travel. Their direction is
actually going to change. And they could hold
on to the rope, and as long as they
hold on to the rope, they'll keep going in circles. And when they let
go of the rope, they'll start going
in whatever direction they were traveling
in when they let go. They'll keep going
on in that direction. And if we assume very,
very, very small frictions from the ice skating
rink, they'll actually have the same speed. So the force, the inward
force, the tension from the rope pulling on the
skater in this situation, would have only changed
the skater's direction. So and unbalanced force
doesn't necessarily have to impact the
object's speed. It often does. But in that situation, it
would have only impacted the skater's direction. Another situation like
this-- and once again, this involves centripetal
acceleration, inward forces, inward acceleration--
is a satellite in orbit, or any type of thing in orbit. So if that is some
type of planet, and this is one of the
planet's moons right over here, the reason why it stays in orbit
is because the pull of gravity keeps making the object
change its direction, but not its speed. Its speed is the
exact right speed. So this was its
speed right here. If the planet wasn't
there, it would just keep going on in that
direction forever and forever. But the planet right
over here, there's an inward force of gravity. And we'll talk more about the
force of gravity in the future. But this inward
force of gravity is going to accelerate this object
inwards while it travels. And so after some
period of time, this object's velocity
vector-- if you add the previous velocity
with how much it's changed its new velocity vector. Now this is after its traveled
a little bit-- its new velocity vector might look
something like this. And it's traveling at
the exact right speed so that the force
of gravity is always at a right angle to
its actual trajectory. It's the exact right speed so it
doesn't go off into deep space and so it doesn't
plummet into the earth. And we'll cover that
in much more detail. But the simple answer is,
unbalanced force on a body will always impact its velocity. It could be its speed,
its direction, or both, but it doesn't have to be both. It could be just the speed
or just the direction. So this is an
incorrect statement. Now the third
statement, "The reason why initially
moving objects tend to come to rest in
our everyday life is because they are being
acted on by unbalanced forces." This is absolutely true. And this is the example we gave. If I take an object,
if I take my book and I try to slide
it across the desk, the reason why it
eventually comes to stop is because we have the
unbalanced force of friction-- the grinding of the
surface of the book with the grinding of the table. If I'm inside of a
pool or even if there's absolutely no
current in the pool, and if I were to try to
push some type of object inside the water,
it eventually comes to stop because of all of the
resistance of the water itself. It's providing an unbalanced
force in a direction opposite it's motion. That is what's slowing it down. So in our everyday
life, the reason why we don't see these
things go on and on forever is that we have
these frictions, these air resistants, or the friction
with actual surfaces. And then the last statement, "An
unbalanced force on an object will always change the
object's direction." Well, this one actually is
maybe the most intuitive. We always have this situation. Let's say I have a
block right over here, and it's traveling with some
velocity in that direction-- five meters per second. If I apply an unbalanced
force in that same direction-- so that's my force
right over there. If I apply it in
that same direction, I'm just going to accelerate
it in that same direction. So I won't
necessarily change it. Even if I were to act against
it, I might decelerate it, but I won't necessarily
change its direction. I could change its direction
by doing something like this, but I don't necessarily. I'm not always
necessarily changing the object's direction. So this is not true. An unbalanced force on
an object will not always change the object's direction. It can, like these
circumstances, but not always. So "always" is what makes
this very, very, very wrong.