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Newton's Art of Guns Combat
End Notes
 

Newton's laws of motion

Newton's First Law: the Law of Inertia

Newton's analysis of motion is summarized in his famous "three laws of motion." In his great work, the Principia (which contains nearly all his work on motion), Newton readily acknowledged his debt to Galileo's results:

"Every body continues in its state of rest or of uniform speed in a straight line unless it is compelled to change that state by forces action on it."

The tendency of a body to maintain its state of rest or of uniform motion in a straight line is called inertia. As a resurlt, Newton's first law is often called the law of inertia.

Inertia and mass

Newton's second law makes use of the concept of mass. Newton himself used the term mass as a synonym for quantity of matter. This intuitive notion of the mass of a body is not very precise because the concept "quantity of matter" is itself not well defined.

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A more precise definition is that mass is a measure of the inertia of a body. The more inertia a body has, the harder it is to change its state of motion; it is harder to start it moving from rest, or to stop it when it is moving, or to change its motion sideways out of a straight line path. A piano or truck has much more inertia than a pencil or a paper clip, and therefore much more mass. The definition of mass as a measure of the inertia of a body is completely compatible with the notion of mass as "quantity of matter."

1. Douglas C. Giancoli, Physics: Principles with Applications,
(Toronto: Prentice-Hall, 1980), 38.

 

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