two activities to verify newton first law of motion
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Teacher Information
Teachers: This material examines Newton’s First Law of Motion in a way that will help you teach the law to your students. The photocopy-ready Student Activities pages will give students the opportunity to learn aspects of the First Law in a way that they will find interesting and fun. Notes about each activity appear in the Notes to Teachers section. The activities can be tailored for the level of your students, and can be completed individually or in groups. In addition, students will create a logbook, called Newton’s Lawbook, in which they can take notes and track their findings from the scientific experiments offered in the Student Activities pages.
Newton’s First Law of Motion
In the absence of a net force, a body at rest remains at rest, and a body in motion remains in motion indefinitely along the same straight line.
Newton’s Laws apply to macroscopic systems – things you can feel and see. There are extreme environments for which Newton’s Laws (or Classical Mechanics) only provide an approximate answer, and more general physical laws must be used. For example, black holes and objects moving at nearly the speed of light are more accurately explained by General Relativity, while “subatomic particles” are explained by Quantum Mechanics.
Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) established the scientific laws that govern 99% or more of our everyday experiences – from how the Moon orbits the Earth and the planets orbit the Sun to how a hockey puck slides over ice, a person rides a bicycle, or a rocket launches a satellite into space. Newton’s Laws are considered by many to be the most important laws of all physical science. They are also a great way to introduce students to the concepts, applications, vocabulary, and methods of science.
Newton’s Laws are related to the concept of motion: Why does an object move like it does? How does the object accelerate or decelerate? To understand these things, we need to understand the relationship between force and motion.
Forces can cause motion. But what exactly is a force? We can think of a force as a push or a pull. A force has a direction as well as a magnitude. A force is a vector quantity which follows the rules of vector addition and subtraction. In a diagram, a force can be represented by an arrow indicating its two qualities: The direction of the arrow shows the direction of the force (push or pull). The length of the arrow is proportional to the magnitude (or strength) of the force.