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A force is an influence that can cause an object to change its velocity unless counterbalanced by other forces. The concept of force makes the everyday notion of pushing or pulling mathematically precise. Because the magnitude and direction of a force are both important, force is a vector quantity.
F is the resultant force applied, t 1 and t 2 are times when the impulse begins and ends, respectively, m is the mass of the object, v 2 is the final velocity of the object at the end of the time interval, and; v 1 is the initial velocity of the object when the time interval begins. Impulse has the same units and dimensions (MLT −1) as momentum.
[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.
The force on the mass is equal to the vector sum of the spring force and the kinetic frictional force. When the velocity changes sign (at the maximum and minimum displacements), the magnitude of the force on the mass changes by twice the magnitude of the frictional force, because the spring force is continuous and the frictional force reverses ...
Newton's law of gravitation resembles Coulomb's law of electrical forces, which is used to calculate the magnitude of the electrical force arising between two charged bodies. Both are inverse-square laws, where force is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between the bodies. Coulomb's law has charge in place of mass and a ...
Velocity is the speed in combination with the direction of motion of an object. Velocity is a fundamental concept in kinematics, the branch of classical mechanics that describes the motion of bodies. Velocity is a physical vector quantity: both magnitude and direction are needed to define it.
In classical mechanics, the central-force problem is to determine the motion of a particle in a single central potential field.A central force is a force (possibly negative) that points from the particle directly towards a fixed point in space, the center, and whose magnitude only depends on the distance of the object to the center.
A force is known as a bound vector—which means it has a direction and magnitude and a point of application. A convenient way to define a force is by a line segment from a point A to a point B. If we denote the coordinates of these points as A = (A x, A y, A z) and B = (B x, B y, B z), then the force vector applied at A is given by