In this video, I want to talk a little bit
about Newton's First Law of Motion.
And this is a translation from Newton's Principia from Latin
into English.
So the First Law, "Every body persists
in a state of being at rest, or moving uniformly
straightforward, except insofar as it is compelled
to change its state by force impressed."
So another way to rephrase what they're saying
is, that if there's something-- every body persists--
so everything will stay at rest, or
moving with a constant velocity, unless it
is compelled to change its state by force.
Unless it's acted on by a force, especially an unbalanced force.
and I'll explain that in a second.
So if I have something that's at rest, so completely at rest.
So I have-- and this is something
that we've seen before.
Let's say that I have a rock.
Let's say that I have a rock someplace
and it's laying on a field of grass,
I can keep observing that rock.
And it is unlikely to move, assuming
that nothing happens to it.
If there's no force applied to that rock,
that rock will just stay there.
So the first part is pretty obvious.
So, "Every body persists in a state of being at rest"--
I'm not going to do the second part--
"except insofar as there's some force being applied to it."
So clearly a rock will be at rest,
unless there's some force applied to it, unless someone
here tries to push it or roll it or do something to it.
What's less intuitive about the first law is the second part.
"Every body persists in," either, "being in a state
of rest or moving uniformly straight forward,
except insofar as it is compelled
to change its state by force impressed."
So this Newton's first law-- and I
think I should do a little aside here,
because, this right here is Newton.
And if this is Newton's first law,
why do I have this huge picture of this guy over here?
Well, the reason is is because Newton's first law is really
just a restatement of this guy's law of inertia.
And this guy, another titan of civilization
really, this is Galileo Galilei.
And he is the first person to formulate the law of inertia.
And Newton just rephrased it a little bit and packaged it
with his other laws.
But he did many, many, many other things.
So you really have to give Galileo
credit for Newton's first law.
So that's why I made him bigger than here.
But I was in the midst of a thought.
So we understand if something is at rest,
it's going to stay at rest, unless there's
some force that acts on it.
And in some definitions, you'll see
unless there's some unbalanced force.
And the reason why they say unbalanced
is, because you could have two forces that act on something
and they might balance out.
For example, I could push on this side of the rock
with a certain amount of force.
And if you push on this side of the rock
with the exact same amount of force, the rock won't move.
And the only way that it would move if there's a lot more
force on one side than on the other side,
so if you have an unbalanced force.
So if you have a ton of-- and maybe the rock
is a bad analogy.
Let's take ice, because ice is easier to move, or ice on ice.
So there's ice right here.
And then, I have another block of ice
sitting on top of that ice.
So once again, we're familiar with the idea,
if there's no force acting on it that ice won't move.
But what happens if I'm pushing on the ice
with a certain amount of force on that side,
and you're pushing on the ice on that side
with the same amount of force?
The ice will still not move.
So this right here, this would be a balanced force.
So the only way for the ice to change its condition, to change
its restful condition is if the force is unbalanced.
So if we add a little bit of force on this side,
so it more than compensates the force pushing it this way,
then you're going to see the ice block start to move,
start to really accelerate in that direction.
But I think this part is obvious.
This, you know, something that's at rest
will stay at rest, unless it's being acted on
by an unbalanced force.
What's less obvious is the idea that something
moving uniformly straightforward, which
is another way of saying something
having a constant velocity.
What he's saying is, is that something
that has a constant velocity will continue
to have that constant velocity indefinitely,
unless it is acted on by an unbalanced force.
And that's less intuitive.
Because everything in our human experience--
even if I were to push this block of ice,
eventually it'll stop.
It won't just keep going forever, even
assuming that this ice field is infinitely long, that ice
will eventually stop.
Or if I throw a tennis ball.
That tennis ball will eventually stop.
It'll eventually grind to a halt.
Or if I roll a bowling ball, or if I, anything.
We've never seen, at least in our human experience,
it looks like everything will eventually stop.
So this is a very unintuitive thing to say,
that something in motion will just
keep going in motion indefinitely.
Everything in human intuition says if you want something
to keep going in motion, you have to keep
putting more force, keep putting more energy into it
for it to keep going.
Your car won't go forever, unless you keep,
unless the engine keeps burning fuel to drive and consuming
energy.
So what are they talking about?
Well, in all of these examples-- and I
think this is actually a pretty brilliant insight from all
of these fellows is that-- all of these things
would have gone on forever.
The ball would keep going forever.
This ice block would be going on forever,
except for the fact that there are unbalanced
forces acting on them to stop them.
So in the case of ice, even though ice on ice
doesn't have a lot of friction, there
is some friction between these two.
And so you have, in this situation,
the force of friction is going to be
acting against the direction of the movement of the ice.
And friction really comes from, at an atomic level--
so if you have the actual water molecules in a lattice
structure in the ice cube, and then here are
the water molecules in a lattice structure on the ice,
on the actual kind of sea of ice that it's traveling on--
they do kind of bump and grind into each other.
Although they're both smooth, there are imperfections here.
They bump and grind.
They generate a little bit of heat.
And they'll, essentially, be working against the movement.
So there's a force of friction that's being applied to here.
And that's why it's stopping.
Not only a force of friction, you also
have some air resistance.
The ice block is going to be bumping
into all sorts of air particles.
It might not be noticeable at first,
but it's definitely going to keep it from going on forever.
Same thing with the ball being tossed to the air.
Obviously, at some point, it hits
the ground because of gravity.
So that's one force acting on it.
But even once it hits the ground,
it doesn't keep rolling forever, once again,
because of the friction, especially if there's grass
here.
The grass is going to stop it from going.
And even while it's in the air, it's going to slow down.
It's not going to have a constant velocity.
Because you have all of these air particles
that are going to bump into it and exert
force to slow it down.
So what was really brilliant about these guys
is that they could imagine a reality where
you didn't have gravity, where you did not
have air slowing things down.
And they could imagine that in that reality,
something would just keep persisting in its motion.
And the reason why Galileo, frankly, was probably good
at thinking about that is that he
studied the orbits of planets.
And he could, or at least he's probably
theorized that, hey, maybe there's no air out there.
And that maybe that's why these planets can just
keep going round and round in orbit.
And I should say their speed, because their direction is
changing, but their speed never slows down,
because there's nothing in the space
to actually slow down those planets.
So anyway, hopefully you found that as fascinating as I do.
Because on some level, it's super-duper obvious.
But on a whole other level, it's completely not obvious,
especially this moving uniformly straightforward.
And just to make the point clear,
if gravity disappeared, and you had no air,
and you threw a ball, that ball literally
would keep going in that direction
forever, unless some other unbalanced force acted
to stop it.
And another way to think about it-- and this
is an example that you might see in everyday life-- is,
if I'm in an airplane that's going at a completely
constant velocity and there's absolutely
no turbulence in the airplane.
So if I'm sitting in the airplane right over here.
And it's going at a constant velocity, completely smooth,
no turbulence.
There's really no way for me to tell whether that airplane is
moving without looking out the window.
Let's assume that there's no windows in that airplane.
It's going at a constant velocity.
And there's no turbulence.
And let's say, I can't hear anything.
So I can't even hear the engines.
There's no way for me to sense that the plane is moving.
Because from my frame of reference,
it looks completely identical to if I
was in that same plane that was resting on the ground.
And that's another way to think about it.
That it's actually very intuitive
that they're similar states, moving at a constant velocity
or being at rest.
And you really can't tell whether you
are one or the other.