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Newton's laws of motion are three physical laws that describe the relationship between the motion of an object and the forces acting on it. These laws, which provide the basis for Newtonian mechanics, can be paraphrased as follows: A body remains at rest, or in motion at a constant speed in a straight line, except insofar as it is acted upon by ...
Simple harmonic motion – motion in which the body oscillates in such a way that the restoring force acting on it is directly proportional to the body's displacement. Mathematically Force is directly proportional to the negative of displacement. Negative sign signifies the restoring nature of the force. (e.g., that of a pendulum).
Celestial motion, without additional forces such as drag forces or the thrust of a rocket, is governed by the reciprocal gravitational acceleration between masses. A generalization is the n -body problem , [ 3 ] where a number n of masses are mutually interacting via the gravitational force.
A molecular vibration is a periodic motion of the atoms of a molecule relative to each other, such that the center of mass of the molecule remains unchanged. The typical vibrational frequencies range from less than 10 13 Hz to approximately 10 14 Hz, corresponding to wavenumbers of approximately 300 to 3000 cm −1 and wavelengths of approximately 30 to 3 μm.
In classical mechanics, Poinsot's construction (after Louis Poinsot) is a geometrical method for visualizing the torque-free motion of a rotating rigid body, that is, the motion of a rigid body on which no external forces are acting. This motion has four constants: the kinetic energy of the body and the three components of the angular momentum ...
In mechanics, a constant of motion is a physical quantity conserved throughout the motion, imposing in effect a constraint on the motion. However, it is a mathematical constraint , the natural consequence of the equations of motion , rather than a physical constraint (which would require extra constraint forces ).
Emphasis has shifted to understanding the fundamental forces of nature as in the Standard Model and its more modern extensions into a unified theory of everything. Classical mechanics is a theory useful for the study of the motion of non-quantum mechanical, low-energy particles in weak gravitational fields.
The systems where the restoring force on a body is directly proportional to its displacement, such as the dynamics of the spring-mass system, are described mathematically by the simple harmonic oscillator and the regular periodic motion is known as simple harmonic motion.