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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 . If the common definition of the word "fall" is used, an object moving upwards is not considered to be falling, but using scientific definitions, if it ...
Based on wind resistance, for example, the terminal velocity of a skydiver in a belly-to-earth (i.e., face down) free-fall position is about 195 km/h (122 mph or 54 m/s). [3] This velocity is the asymptotic limiting value of the acceleration process, because the effective forces on the body balance each other more and more closely as the ...
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 supernovae—in which gravity plays a dominant ro
The equivalence principle is the hypothesis that the observed equivalence of gravitational and inertial mass is a consequence of nature. The weak form, known for centuries, relates to masses of any composition in free fall taking the same trajectories and landing at identical times.
The study of mechanics is complicated by the fact that household words like energy are used with a technical meaning. [10] [11] Moreover, words which are synonymous in everyday speech are not so in physics: force is not the same as power or pressure, for example, and mass has a different meaning than weight.
In physics and engineering, a free body diagram (FBD; also called a force diagram) [1] is a graphical illustration used to visualize the applied forces, moments, and resulting reactions on a free body in a given condition. It depicts a body or connected bodies with all the applied forces and moments, and reactions, which act on the body(ies).
When the gravitational field is non-uniform, a body in free fall experiences tidal forces and is not stress-free. Near a black hole, such tidal effects can be very strong, leading to spaghettification. In the case of the Earth, the effects are minor, especially on objects of relatively small dimensions (such as the human body or a spacecraft ...
For example, a force of 1 g on an object sitting on the Earth's surface is caused by the mechanical force exerted in the upward direction by the ground, keeping the object from going into free fall. The upward contact force from the ground ensures that an object at rest on the Earth's surface is accelerating relative to the free-fall condition.