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There are two main descriptions of motion: dynamics and kinematics.Dynamics is general, since the momenta, forces and energy of the particles are taken into account. In this instance, sometimes the term dynamics refers to the differential equations that the system satisfies (e.g., Newton's second law or Euler–Lagrange equations), and sometimes to the solutions to those equations.
Classical mechanics is the branch of physics used to describe the motion of macroscopic objects. [1] It is the most familiar of the theories of physics. The concepts it covers, such as mass, acceleration, and force, are commonly used and known. [2]
In physics, there are equations in every field to relate physical quantities to each other and perform calculations. Entire handbooks of equations can only summarize most of the full subject, else are highly specialized within a certain field. Physics is derived of formulae only.
The equations ignore air resistance, which has a dramatic effect on objects falling an appreciable distance in air, causing them to quickly approach a terminal velocity. The effect of air resistance varies enormously depending on the size and geometry of the falling object—for example, the equations are hopelessly wrong for a feather, which ...
In the classical central-force problem of classical mechanics, some potential energy functions () produce motions or orbits that can be expressed in terms of well-known functions, such as the trigonometric functions and elliptic functions. This article describes these functions and the corresponding solutions for the orbits.
[12] [13]: 150 The physics concept of force makes quantitative the everyday idea of a push or a pull. Forces in Newtonian mechanics are often due to strings and ropes, friction, muscle effort, gravity, and so forth. Like displacement, velocity, and acceleration, force is a vector quantity.
A twist is a screw used to represent the velocity of a rigid body as an angular velocity around an axis and a linear velocity along this axis. All points in the body have the same component of the velocity along the axis, however the greater the distance from the axis the greater the velocity in the plane perpendicular to this axis.
Such forces act perpendicular to the velocity vector associated with the motion of an object, and therefore do not change the speed of the object (magnitude of the velocity), but only the direction of the velocity vector. More generally, the net force that accelerates an object can be resolved into a component that is perpendicular to the path ...