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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 ]
The moment of inertia depends on how mass is distributed around an axis of rotation, and will vary depending on the chosen axis. For a point-like mass, the moment of inertia about some axis is given by , where is the distance of the point from the axis, and is the mass. For an extended rigid body, the moment of inertia is just the sum of all ...
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 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.
The second polar moment of area, also known (incorrectly, colloquially) as "polar moment of inertia" or even "moment of inertia", is a quantity used to describe resistance to torsional deformation (), in objects (or segments of an object) with an invariant cross-section and no significant warping or out-of-plane deformation. [1]
The principle first appeared in "Does the inertia of a body depend upon its energy-content?", one of his annus mirabilis papers, published on 21 November 1905. [5] [6] The formula and its relationship to momentum, as described by the energy–momentum relation, were later developed by other physicists.
Newton's laws are often stated in terms of point or particle masses, that is, bodies whose volume is negligible. This is a reasonable approximation for real bodies when the motion of internal parts can be neglected, and when the separation between bodies is much larger than the size of each.
The moment of inertia of an object, symbolized by , is a measure of the object's resistance to changes to its rotation. The moment of inertia is measured in kilogram metre² (kg m 2). It depends on the object's mass: increasing the mass of an object increases the moment of inertia.