Lecture 7 and 8

Saif Ahmed (SfA)

Lecturer, Department of Mathematics and Physics
North South University
Newtonian Mechanics
• The relation between a force and the acceleration it causes was first
understood by Isaac Newton (1642–1727) and is the subject of this chapter.
The study of that relation, as Newton presented it, is called Newtonian
mechanics. We shall focus on its three primary laws of motion.
• Newtonian mechanics does not apply to all situations. If the speeds of the
interacting bodies are very large—an appreciable fraction of the speed of
light—we must replace Newtonian mechanics with Einstein’s special theory
of relativity, which holds at any speed, including those near the speed of
light. If the interacting bodies are on the scale of atomic structure (for
example, they might be electrons in an atom), we must replace Newtonian
mechanics with quantum mechanics
Newton’s First Law
• A force is needed to keep a body moving
• A body is in it’s natural state when it is at rest
If you send a puck sliding across a wooden floor, it does indeed slow and then stop.
If you want to make it move across the floor with constant velocity, you have to
continuously pull or push it. Send a puck sliding over the ice of a skating rink,
however, and it goes a lot farther. You can imagine longer and more slippery
surfaces, over which the puck would slide farther and farther. In the limit you can
think of a long, extremely slippery surface (said to be a frictionless surface), over
which the puck would hardly slow. (We can in fact come close to this situation by
sending a puck sliding over a horizontal air table, across which it moves on a film of
air.)
From these observations, we can conclude that a body will keep moving with
constant velocity if no force acts on it. That leads us to the first of Newton’s three
laws of motion:
Vectors.

Force is a vector quantity and thus has not only

magnitude but also direction. So, if two or more
forces act on a body, we find the net force (or
resultant force) by adding them as vectors.
A single force that has the same magnitude and direction
as the calculated net force would then have the same
effect as all the individual forces. This fact, called the
principle of superposition for forces, makes everyday
forces reasonable and predictable. The world would
indeed be strange and unpredictable if, say, you and a
friend each pulled on the standard body with a force of 1N
and somehow the net pull was 14 N and the resulting
acceleration was 14 meters per second squared
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Solution
Example
Solution
Example