Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Free fall. In classical mechanics, free fall is any motion of a body where gravity is the only force acting upon it. A freely falling object may not necessarily be falling down in the vertical direction. An object moving upwards might not normally be considered to be falling, but if it is subject to only the force of gravity, it is said to be ...
The first equation shows that, after one second, an object will have fallen a distance of 1/2 × 9.8 × 1 2 = 4.9 m. After two seconds it will have fallen 1/2 × 9.8 × 2 2 = 19.6 m; and so on. On the other hand, the penultimate equation becomes grossly inaccurate at great distances. If an object fell 10 000 m to Earth, then the results of both ...
Free-fall time. The free-fall time is the characteristic time that would take a body to collapse under its own gravitational attraction, if no other forces existed to oppose the collapse. As such, it plays a fundamental role in setting the timescale for a wide variety of astrophysical processes—from star formation to helioseismology to ...
Newton's first law expresses the principle of inertia: the natural behavior of a body is to move in a straight line at constant speed. A body's motion preserves the status quo, but external forces can perturb this. The modern understanding of Newton's first law is that no inertial observer is privileged over any other.
Gravitational acceleration. In physics, gravitational acceleration is the acceleration of an object in free fall within a vacuum (and thus without experiencing drag). This is the steady gain in speed caused exclusively by gravitational attraction. All bodies accelerate in vacuum at the same rate, regardless of the masses or compositions of the ...
The net force on the object is zero, and the result is that the velocity of the object remains constant. Terminal velocity is the maximum speed attainable by an object as it falls through a fluid (air is the most common example). It is reached when the sum of the drag force (Fd) and the buoyancy is equal to the downward force of gravity (FG ...
These last three equations can be used as the starting point for the derivation of an equation of motion in General Relativity, instead of assuming that acceleration is zero in free fall. [2] Because the Minkowski tensor is involved here, it becomes necessary to introduce something called the metric tensor in General Relativity.
Stokes' law. In fluid dynamics, Stokes' law is an empirical law for the frictional force – also called drag force – exerted on spherical objects with very small Reynolds numbers in a viscous fluid. [1] It was derived by George Gabriel Stokes in 1851 by solving the Stokes flow limit for small Reynolds numbers of the Navier–Stokes equations.