Newton's Second Law For A System of Rigid Bodies
To consider rigid body dynamics, Newton's second law must be extended to define the relationship between the movement of a rigid body and the system of forces and torques that act on it.
Newton's formulated his second law for a particle as, "The change of motion of an object is proportional to the force impressed and is made in the direction of the straight line in which the force is impressed." Because Newton generally referred to mass times velocity as the "motion" of a particle, the phrase "change of motion" refers to the mass times acceleration of the particle, and so this law is usually written as
where F is understood to be the only external force acting on the particle, m is the mass of the particle, and a is its acceleration vector. The extension of Newton's second law to rigid bodies is achieved by considering a rigid system of particles.
Read more about this topic: Rigid Body Dynamics
Famous quotes containing the words newton, law, system, rigid and/or bodies:
“Where the statue stood
Of Newton with his prism and silent face,
The marble index of a mind for ever
Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone.”
—William Wordsworth (1770–1850)
“The law of humanity ought to be composed of the past, the present, and the future, that we bear within us; whoever possesses but one of these terms, has but a fragment of the law of the moral world.”
—Edgar Quinet (1803–1875)
“The United States is unusual among the industrial democracies in the rigidity of the system of ideological control—”indoctrination” we might say—exercised through the mass media.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)
“The essence of statesmanship is not a rigid adherence to the past, but a prudent and probing concern for the future.”
—Hubert H. Humphrey (1911–1978)
“Many things about our bodies would not seem to us so filthy and obscene if we did not have the idea of nobility in our heads.”
—G.C. (Georg Christoph)