NEWTON'S LAWS OF MOTION

The Principia was published in 1687, when Newton was 44, and details all his work on the motion of bodies. The style of the Principia is reflective of its author: cold and rigid; its pages are laden with diagrams and geometric proofs. Although Newton undeniably arrived at his results by using his newly developed calculus, in the Principia he presented geometric proofs - the language of physics in the seventeenth century. At Newton's own Cambridge University, a stately institution not given to undue haste, the Principia was used as a textbook right into the twentieth century. To remove the confusion in terminology, Newton began by saying carefully what he meant by terms such as inertia, mass, and force. He used these terms in his axioms of motion, which he presented as statements that need no proof. These axioms are the basis from which the nature of all types of motion can be deduced. Newton inherited from Galileo and Descartes the essential idea that motion along a straight line with a constant speed was the natural state of any body, needing no further explanation. This is Newton's first law, the law of inertia. Stated in his own words, First Law: Every body continues in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a straight line, unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed upon it.

Newton, like Galileo before him, realized that an object's inertia was somehow connected to its mass. He defined mass as the quantity of matter that arises conjointly from an object's density and size. The greater the mass of an object, the more difficult it is to prevent it from continuing in motion with a constant velocity. This idea led to his second law. In the Principia it is modestly stated as Second Law: The change of motion is proportional to the force impressed; and is made in the direction of the straight line in which the force is impressed. What Newton meant by "motion" involved not only a body's velocity, but also its mass. It is the quantity we call momentum, the product of mass m and velocity v. Stated as an equation, the second law is

F =

d (mv) dt

The d/dt is a mathematical symbol meaning "the instantaneous rate of change of." When we understand that, the equation expresses Newton's second law almost as we would in an English sentence in which F is the subject and "=" is the verb. The mathematical sentence says, "Force is equal to the rate of change of momentum of an object."

If the second law is applied to a body for which the mass m is a constant, then by a rule of differentiation this means that d(mv)/dt = m dv/dt. So for an object (or collection of objects) whose mass doesn't change, Newton's second law tells us that acceleration is caused by forces. It is usually written F = ma. This form was first presented by the Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler 65 years after the publication of the Principia. It is probably the most useful equation in all of physics. To understand Newton's second law, we need to understand the concept of force. In everyday language, force is associated with a push or a pull. When you push on something, you can feel yourself exerting a force. Once armed with that sensation, you look around and find countless examples of things exerting forces on other things. Pushes, pulls, gravity, tension in a string, and friction are all examples of forces that enter Newton's second law. But these forces must originate outside the object whose motion we're trying to describe. In other words, only external forces acting on an object can change its motion. The force F need not be just one force acting on the body. It is the vector sum of all external forces acting on the object. Even though vectors hadn't been invented yet, Newton knew that forces have both a magnitude and a direction. Whenever we write F = ma, F symbolizes the vector sum of external forces acting on a body. The acceleration of an object is the result of the total force acting on it. Some physicists use Fnet to remind them that it is the net or total force that enters the equation. Others write F to symbolize the vector sum. The symbol is the Greek letter sigma and means sum. The second law, being a vector equation, is shorthand for three equations involving Cartesian components:

F = ma , F = ma , F = ma ,
x y x y z 2

It is this form that is more useful for solving problems. Once the respective components of the external forces acting on a body are known, the components of the acceleration are determined by the equations, and the motion of the body can be deduced. Newton needed one additional law to express what happens when several bodies interact with each other. His third law is Third Law: To every action there is always opposed and equal reaction: or, the mutual actions of two bodies upon each other are always equal, and directed to contrary parts.

When you push on anything - a door, a pencil - it pushes back on you with a force equal in magnitude but in the opposite direction. In other words, you can't touch without being touched.

That's the essence of the third law - a law of interactions. If Body 1 exerts a force F12 on Body 2, then Body 2 exerts a force F21 on Body 1 such that F12 = -F21. Sometimes it is difficult to isolate the action-reaction pairs of forces in Newton's third law. As a guide, remember that they always act on different bodies, never on the same body. If you know one force - for example, you pull on a rope - you can find the reaction force by turning around the sentence: the rope pulls on you. As with the second law, the third law is best understood through applications.