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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]
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.
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.
D'Alembert's principle generalizes the principle of virtual work from static to dynamical systems by introducing forces of inertia which, when added to the applied forces in a system, result in dynamic equilibrium. [1] [2] D'Alembert's principle can be applied in cases of kinematic constraints that depend on velocities.
The moment of inertia is defined as the product of mass of section and the square of the distance between the reference axis and the centroid of the section. Spinning figure skaters can reduce their moment of inertia by pulling in their arms, allowing them to spin faster due to conservation of angular momentum.
Classical mechanics was traditionally divided into three main branches. 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. [3]
The equivalence principle is the hypothesis that the observed equivalence of gravitational and inertial mass is a consequence of nature. The weak form, known for centuries, relates to masses of any composition in free fall taking the same trajectories and landing at identical times.