experiment to illustrate Newton's first law of motion
Answers
Many years ago, Sir Isaac Newton came up with some most excellent descriptions about motion. His First Law of Motion is as follows: “An object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion stays in motion unless acted upon by an outside force.” Quite a mouthful. What that means is that something that is sitting there will continue to sit there unless moved. And something moving will keep moving unless something stops it.
Still a mouthful. Just think about this: When you are at a stoplight in your car and you start moving quickly, you feel pushed back into your chair. The opposite is true if you come to a sudden stop, and you move keep moving forward, with only your seatbelt preventing you from crashing forward.
Here are a couple of experiments that demonstrate this very cool law of motion; in a word called “inertia.”
Ball Bounce Experiment
Materials for the Ball Bounce Experiment:
A basketball or soccer ball, or similar bouncy ball
a smaller bouncy ball (like a tennis ball or a racquet ball).
Have an assortment of other balls handy for further experimenting.
Procedure:
Do this experiment outside
First bounce the basketball and tennis ball side by side to compare their bounces. Start them off around chest height
Make a hypothesis (a guess) about what will happen when you stack the small ball on top of the bigger one and then drop it
Try it! It may take a couple tries to line them up just right but the results are pretty awesome
Explanation:
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The energy of motion from the bigger ball is transferred into the smaller one. Most of your attention is on the sky-rocketing smaller ball, but if you look at the basketball, it doesn’t have much bounce at all!
Experiment further:
Hopefully this will make you think of other things. Like what if you switched the two balls and dropped the smaller one on the bottom? What if you used two of the same sized ball? A golf ball on top? Think of other things!