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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. The concept of an ...
English: In this image, Newton's Laws of Motion are shown throughout common occurrences of a soccer match. In the first law, the ball is influenced by the wind, an unbalanced force, causing it to roll. In the second law, the ball is being kicked causing its acceleration to be dependent on the mass of the soccer ball and the net force of the kick.
Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (English: The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy) [1] often referred to as simply the Principia (/ p r ɪ n ˈ s ɪ p i ə, p r ɪ n ˈ k ɪ p i ə /), is a book by Isaac Newton that expounds Newton's laws of motion and his law of universal gravitation.
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 later first law of motion is to similar effect, Law 1 in the Principia.) 3: Forces combine by a parallelogram rule. Newton treats them in effect as we now treat vectors. This point reappears in Corollaries 1 and 2 to the third law of motion, Law 3 in the Principia.
In mechanics, Newton was also the first to provide the first correct scientific and mathematical formulation of gravity in Newton's law of universal gravitation. The combination of Newton's laws of motion and gravitation provides the fullest and most accurate description of classical mechanics.
However, the principle of special relativity generalizes the notion of an inertial frame to include all physical laws, not simply Newton's first law. Newton viewed the first law as valid in any reference frame that is in uniform motion (neither rotating nor accelerating) relative to absolute space; as a practical matter, "absolute space" was ...
In 1679, he returned to his work on celestial mechanics by considering gravitation and its effect on the orbits of planets with reference to Kepler's laws of planetary motion. Newton's reawakening interest in astronomical matters received further stimulus by the appearance of a comet in the winter of 1680–1681, on which he corresponded with ...