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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 ...
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]
Within the realm of Newtonian mechanics, an inertial frame of reference, or inertial reference frame, is one in which Newton's first law of motion is valid. [17] However, the principle of special relativity generalizes the notion of an inertial frame to include all physical laws, not simply Newton's first law.
Among other achievements, it explains Johannes Kepler's laws of planetary motion, which Kepler had first obtained empirically. In formulating his physical laws, Newton developed and used mathematical methods now included in the field of calculus, expressing them in the form of geometric propositions about "vanishingly small" shapes. [10]
Euler's second law states that the rate of change of angular momentum L about a point that is fixed in an inertial reference frame (often the center of mass of the body), is equal to the sum of the external moments of force acting on that body M about that point: [1] [4] [5]
The term "inertia" was used by Kepler who applied it to bodies at rest. (The first law of motion is now often called the law of inertia.) Galileo did not fully grasp the third law of motion, the law of the equality of action and reaction, though he corrected some errors of Aristotle. With Stevin and others Galileo also wrote on statics. He ...
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.
Isaac Newton was the first to unify the three laws of motion (the law of inertia, his second law mentioned above, and the law of action and reaction), and to prove that these laws govern both earthly and celestial objects in 1687 in his treatise Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica. Newton and most of his contemporaries hoped that ...