Thursday, June 14, 2007

An Introduction to Science

Today, I decided to begin a new (and hopefully regular) section. As someone who has always been interested in Physics, I thought that my inimitable qualifications (ie: none at all) enabled me to give some gyan on things that I thought interesting.
Well, that is enough of an introduction. Now on to what I think is the fundamental principle of mechanics. Forces.
The first question to ask is, "What on earth is a force?" This is what my 8th standard Physics Book had to say on the subject.
"A force is anything that changes, or tends to change the state of rest or of uniform motion of a body in a straight line." Hmm...fairly categorical that. But what does that statement actually say?
By using the Bala (tm) method of analysis (ie: reading the sentence), we can break it down to its bare meaning which every one of us has seen or felt. To move something you have to push!
Now consider the meaning of the statement in more detail. Newton (or whoever) says that for something to change its position, some effort (force) has to be applied. Why is this so? Now we come to the concept of Inertia.
"Inertia is a property of a body which resists its change from a state of rest or of uniform motion in a straight line" (Yes, you guessed it. Its from the same textbook!)
So, coming back to English, we can define Inertia as the tendency of a body to resist a change in its state, whatever it may be. Why should a body resist this? I don't know. And I doubt too many people do. Anyone who claimed to know why a body resists change has invariably given up in despair or has stormed away after enough "But Why?" thrown in his direction. But the fact of the matter is that for some reason, nobody likes being moved. So there!
Now for a quick recap of what gyan I have given. Force is that which tries (successfully or not) to change a body's current state (of rest or of motion). What this means in reality is that you need some force in order to start a body moving and you need some force to stop it from moving once you get it going.
This is seen in real life. To move a car, we need to use some force (whether from the petrol engine or from push-starting the dashed thing). And to stop it, we need to press the brakes, which in turn apply a force on the wheels. So that is the first fundamental concept.
Next time, I shall start giving gyan on momentum; after touching upon velocity, vectors, along with polysyllabic words like differentiation and conservation...And all with equations too.


Oh...and welcome to the blog! :)

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