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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]
For a simple pendulum, this definition yields a formula for the moment of inertia I in terms of the mass m of the pendulum and its distance r from the pivot point as, =. Thus, the moment of inertia of the pendulum depends on both the mass m of a body and its geometry, or shape, as defined by the distance r to the axis of rotation.
The moments of inertia of a mass have units of dimension ML 2 ([mass] × [length] 2). It should not be confused with the second moment of area, which has units of dimension L 4 ([length] 4) and is used in beam calculations. The mass moment of inertia is often also known as the rotational inertia, and sometimes as the angular mass.
An arbitrary shape. ρ is the distance to the element dA, with projections x and y on the x and y axes.. The second moment of area for an arbitrary shape R with respect to an arbitrary axis ′ (′ axis is not drawn in the adjacent image; is an axis coplanar with x and y axes and is perpendicular to the line segment) is defined as ′ = where
For typical applications in nuclear physics, where one particle's mass is much larger than the other the reduced mass can be approximated as the smaller mass of the system. The limit of the reduced mass formula as one mass goes to infinity is the smaller mass, thus this approximation is used to ease calculations, especially when the larger ...
In classical physics and special relativity, an inertial frame of reference (also called an inertial space or a Galilean reference frame) is a frame of reference in which objects exhibit inertia: they remain at rest or in uniform motion relative to the frame until acted upon by external forces.
The moment of force, or torque, is a first moment: =, or, more generally, .; Similarly, angular momentum is the 1st moment of momentum: =.Momentum itself is not a moment.; The electric dipole moment is also a 1st moment: = for two opposite point charges or () for a distributed charge with charge density ().
An example is the calculation of the rotational kinetic energy of the Earth. As the Earth has a sidereal rotation period of 23.93 hours, it has an angular velocity of 7.29 × 10 −5 rad·s −1. [2] The Earth has a moment of inertia, I = 8.04 × 10 37 kg·m 2. [3] Therefore, it has a rotational kinetic energy of 2.14 × 10 29 J.