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In Newtonian mechanics, momentum (pl.: momenta or momentums; more specifically linear momentum or translational momentum) is the product of the mass and velocity of an object. . It is a vector quantity, possessing a magnitude and a directi
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 ().
Internal forces between the particles that make up a body do not contribute to changing the momentum of the body as there is an equal and opposite force resulting in no net effect. [3] The linear momentum of a rigid body is the product of the mass of the body and the velocity of its center of mass v cm. [1] [4] [5]
A body remains at rest, or in motion at a constant speed in a straight line, except insofar as it is acted upon by a force. At any instant of time, the net force on a body is equal to the rate at which the body's momentum is changing with time. If two bodies exert forces on each other, these forces have the same magnitude but opposite directions.
The trivial case of the angular momentum of a body in an orbit is given by = where is the mass of the orbiting object, is the orbit's frequency and is the orbit's radius.. The angular momentum of a uniform rigid sphere rotating around its axis, instead, is given by = where is the sphere's mass, is the frequency of rotation and is the sphere's radius.
The scalar moment of inertia, , of a body about a specified axis whose direction is specified by the unit vector ^ and passes through the body at a point is as follows: [7] = ^ (= []) ^ = ^ ^ = ^ ^, where is the moment of inertia matrix of the system relative to the reference point , and [] is the skew symmetric matrix obtained from the vector =.
This equation holds for a body or system, such as one or more particles, with total energy E, invariant mass m 0, and momentum of magnitude p; the constant c is the speed of light. It assumes the special relativity case of flat spacetime [ 1 ] [ 2 ] [ 3 ] and that the particles are free.
A very useful special case, often given as the definition of torque in fields other than physics, is as follows: = (). The construction of the "moment arm" is shown in the figure to the right, along with the vectors r and F mentioned above. The problem with this definition is that it does not give the direction of the torque but only the ...