Newton's second law in the context of "Acceleration"

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⭐ Core Definition: Newton's second law

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:

  1. A body remains at rest, or in motion at a constant speed in a straight line, unless it is acted upon by a force.
  2. At any instant of time, the net force on a body is equal to the body's acceleration multiplied by its mass or, equivalently, the rate at which the body's momentum is changing with time.
  3. If two bodies exert forces on each other, these forces have the same magnitude but opposite directions.

The three laws of motion were first stated by Isaac Newton in his Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy), originally published in 1687. Newton used them to investigate and explain the motion of many physical objects and systems. In the time since Newton, new insights, especially around the concept of energy, built the field of classical mechanics on his foundations. In modern times, limitations to Newton's laws have been discovered; new theories were consequently developed, such as quantum mechanics and relativity to address the physics of objects in more extreme cases.

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👉 Newton's second law in the context of Acceleration

In mechanics, acceleration is the rate of change of the velocity of an object with respect to time. Acceleration is one of several components of kinematics, the study of motion. Accelerations are vector quantities (in that they have magnitude and direction). The orientation of an object's acceleration is given by the orientation of the net force acting on that object. The magnitude of an object's acceleration, as described by Newton's second law, is the combined effect of two causes:

The SI unit for acceleration is metre per second squared (m⋅s, ).

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Newton's second law in the context of Statics

Statics is the branch of classical mechanics that is concerned with the analysis of force and torque acting on a physical system that does not experience an acceleration, but rather is in equilibrium with its environment.

If is the total of the forces acting on the system, is the mass of the system and is the acceleration of the system, Newton's second law states that (the bold font indicates a vector quantity, i.e. one with both magnitude and direction). If , then . As for a system in static equilibrium, the acceleration equals zero, the system is either at rest, or its center of mass moves at constant velocity.

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Newton's second law in the context of Dynamics (mechanics)

In physics, dynamics or classical dynamics is the study of forces and their effect on motion.It is a branch of classical mechanics, along with statics and kinematics.The fundamental principle of dynamics is linked to Newton's second law.

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Newton's second law in the context of Schrödinger equation

The Schrödinger equation is a partial differential equation that governs the wave function of a non-relativistic quantum-mechanical system. Its discovery was a significant landmark in the development of quantum mechanics. It is named after Erwin Schrödinger, an Austrian physicist, who postulated the equation in 1925 and published it in 1926, forming the basis for the work that resulted in his Nobel Prize in Physics in 1933.

Conceptually, the Schrödinger equation is the quantum counterpart of Newton's second law in classical mechanics. Given a set of known initial conditions, Newton's second law makes a mathematical prediction as to what path a given physical system will take over time. The Schrödinger equation gives the evolution over time of the wave function, the quantum-mechanical characterization of an isolated physical system. The equation was postulated by Schrödinger based on a postulate of Louis de Broglie that all matter has an associated matter wave. The equation predicted bound states of the atom in agreement with experimental observations.

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Newton's second law in the context of Navier–Stokes equations

The Navier–Stokes equations (/nævˈj ˈstks/ nav-YAY STOHKS) are partial differential equations which describe the motion of viscous fluid substances. They were named after French engineer and physicist Claude-Louis Navier and the Irish physicist and mathematician Sir George Gabriel Stokes, Bt. They were developed over several decades of progressively building the theories, from 1822 (Navier) to 1842–1850 (Stokes).

The Navier–Stokes equations mathematically express momentum balance for Newtonian fluids and make use of conservation of mass. They are sometimes accompanied by an equation of state relating pressure, temperature and density. They arise from applying Isaac Newton's second law to fluid motion, together with the assumption that the stress in the fluid is the sum of a diffusing viscous term (proportional to the gradient of velocity) and a pressure term—hence describing viscous flow. The difference between them and the closely related Euler equations is that Navier–Stokes equations take viscosity into account while the Euler equations model only inviscid flow. As a result, the Navier–Stokes are an elliptic equation and therefore have better analytic properties, at the expense of having less mathematical structure (e.g. they are never completely integrable).

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