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Inertia is the natural tendency of objects in motion to stay in motion and objects at rest to stay at rest, unless a force causes the velocity to change. It is one of the fundamental principles in classical physics , and described by Isaac Newton in his first law of motion (also known as The Principle of Inertia). [ 1 ]
Newton's laws are often stated in terms of point or particle masses, that is, bodies whose volume is negligible. This is a reasonable approximation for real bodies when the motion of internal parts can be neglected, and when the separation between bodies is much larger than the size of each.
The moment of inertia also appears in momentum, kinetic energy, and in Newton's laws of motion for a rigid body as a physical parameter that combines its shape and mass. There is an interesting difference in the way moment of inertia appears in planar and spatial movement.
The laws of nature take a simpler form in inertial frames of reference because in these frames one did not have to introduce inertial forces when writing down Newton's law of motion. [ 42 ] In practice, using a frame of reference based upon the fixed stars as though it were an inertial frame of reference introduces little discrepancy.
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.
In the inertial frame, the differential equation is not always helpful in solving for the motion of a general rotating rigid body, as both I in and ω can change during the motion. One may instead change to a coordinate frame fixed in the rotating body, in which the moment of inertia tensor is constant.
Euler also worked out analogous laws of motion to those of Newton, see Euler's laws of motion. These extend the scope of Newton's laws to rigid bodies, but are essentially the same as above. A new equation Euler formulated is: [10]
In physics, equations of motion are equations that describe the behavior of a physical system in terms of its motion as a function of time. [3] More specifically, the equations of motion describe the behavior of a physical system as a set of mathematical functions in terms of dynamic variables.