Newton's Laws of Motion
Discover how objects move and interact with forces
Things like to keep doing what they’re doing — still things stay still, and moving things keep moving — until a push or pull changes that. Bigger or heavier things need a bigger push to get going.
- 01
First Law (Law of Inertia): An object at rest stays at rest, and an object in motion stays in motion unless acted upon by an external force.
- 02
Second Law: Force equals mass times acceleration (F = ma). The greater the mass, the more force needed to accelerate an object.
- 03
Third Law: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. When one object exerts a force on another, the second object exerts an equal force in the opposite direction.
Sir Isaac Newton's Revolutionary Ideas
In 1687, Sir Isaac Newton published his groundbreaking work 'Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica' (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy), which laid the foundation for classical mechanics. Newton's laws of motion revolutionized our understanding of how objects move and interact with forces.
Key figures
Formulated the three laws of motion and the law of universal gravitation in the late 17th century.
His earlier work on falling bodies and inertia paved the way for Newton's first law.
Part of the Physics Playground
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