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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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