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Gravitational "weight" is the force created when a mass is acted upon by a gravitational field and the object is not allowed to free-fall, but is supported or retarded by a mechanical force, such as the surface of a planet. Such a force constitutes weight. [2] This force can be added to by any other kind of force.
In United States customary units, the pound can be either a unit of force or a unit of mass. [24] Related units used in some distinct, separate subsystems of units include the poundal and the slug. The poundal is defined as the force necessary to accelerate an object of one-pound mass at 1 ft/s 2, and is equivalent to about 1/32.2 of a pound-force.
If a first body of mass m A is placed at a distance r (center of mass to center of mass) from a second body of mass m B, each body is subject to an attractive force F g = Gm A m B /r 2, where G = 6.67 × 10 −11 N⋅kg −2 ⋅m 2 is the "universal gravitational constant". This is sometimes referred to as gravitational mass.
The SI unit of force is the newton (symbol N), which is the force required to accelerate a one kilogram mass at a rate of one meter per second squared, or kg·m·s −2.The corresponding CGS unit is the dyne, the force required to accelerate a one gram mass by one centimeter per second squared, or g·cm·s −2. A newton is thus equal to ...
[10] [11] Moreover, words which are synonymous in everyday speech are not so in physics: force is not the same as power or pressure, for example, and mass has a different meaning than weight. [12] [13]: 150 The physics concept of force makes quantitative the everyday idea of a push or a pull. Forces in Newtonian mechanics are often due to ...
where F is the gravitational force acting between two objects, m 1 and m 2 are the masses of the objects, r is the distance between the centers of their masses, and G is the gravitational constant. The first test of Newton's law of gravitation between masses in the laboratory was the Cavendish experiment conducted by the British scientist Henry ...
A force originates from within a field, such as an electro-static field (caused by static electrical charges), electro-magnetic field (caused by moving charges), or gravitational field (caused by mass), among others. Newton was the first to mathematically express the relationship between force and momentum.
Thus, the force between two particles is actually the average of a very large number of atomic forces between their molecules; and physical quantities like mass, velocity, and forces that act through the bulk of three-dimensional bodies, like gravity, are assumed to be smoothly distributed over them.