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One may compare linear motion to general motion. In general motion, a particle's position and velocity are described by vectors, which have a magnitude and direction. In linear motion, the directions of all the vectors describing the system are equal and constant which means the objects move along the same axis and do not change direction.
All frames of reference with zero acceleration are in a state of constant rectilinear motion (straight-line motion) with respect to one another. In such a frame, an object with zero net force acting on it, is perceived to move with a constant velocity, or, equivalently, Newton's first law of motion holds. Such frames are known as inertial.
Position space (also real space or coordinate space) is the set of all position vectors r in Euclidean space, and has dimensions of length; a position vector defines a point in space. (If the position vector of a point particle varies with time, it will trace out a path, the trajectory of a particle.)
Euler's second law states that the rate of change of angular momentum L about a point that is fixed in an inertial reference frame (often the center of mass of the body), is equal to the sum of the external moments of force acting on that body M about that point: [1] [4] [5]
Figure 3: The momentum vector p (shown in blue) moves on a circle as the particle moves on an ellipse. The four labeled points correspond to those in Figure 1. The circle is centered on the y-axis at position A/L (shown in magenta), with radius mk/L (shown in green). The angle η determines the eccentricity e of the elliptical orbit (cos η = e).
Maupertuis defined his action as , which was to be minimized over all paths connecting two specified points. Here v {\displaystyle v} is the velocity of light the corpuscular theory. Fermat had minimized ∫ d s / v {\textstyle \int \,ds/v} where v {\displaystyle v} is wave velocity; the two velocities are reciprocal so the two forms are ...
Hamilton's principle states that the true evolution q(t) of a system described by N generalized coordinates q = (q 1, q 2, ..., q N) between two specified states q 1 = q(t 1) and q 2 = q(t 2) at two specified times t 1 and t 2 is a stationary point (a point where the variation is zero) of the action functional [] = ((), ˙ (),) where (, ˙,) is the Lagrangian function for the system.
In classical mechanics, the central-force problem is to determine the motion of a particle in a single central potential field.A central force is a force (possibly negative) that points from the particle directly towards a fixed point in space, the center, and whose magnitude only depends on the distance of the object to the center.