← all subjects

Mechanics & Dynamics

Mechanics is the study of how interactions change motion. Specify the forces on a system and you can, in principle, predict its entire future — where it goes, how fast, and when.

FIG_002
θm
A pendulum: gravity's restoring torque gives simple harmonic motion for small swings.

Kinematics comes first — position, velocity, and acceleration as the geometry of motion, before any mention of what causes it. Vectors carry that geometry into two and three dimensions.

Then Newton's laws supply the cause. Force equals mass times acceleration is a differential equation for the trajectory, and the art is learning to read the forces off a situation and write it down.

FIG_003
θmgNf
The free-body diagram: isolate the object and draw only the forces acting on it — weight, normal, friction.

Solving the equations directly is often hard, so mechanics leans on conservation laws. Energy is the first: work done on a body changes its kinetic energy, and stored potential energy converts back into motion.

Momentum is the second, and it makes collisions and many-body problems tractable. Whatever the internal forces, the total momentum of an isolated system is unchanged.

FIG_004
mm
An elastic collision of equal masses: the velocities simply swap, momentum and energy both conserved.
FIG_001
xθv0gapex
Projectile motion: constant horizontal velocity, gravity bending the path into a parabola, the velocity vector tangent at every point.

Extend the same ideas to spinning bodies and you get rotational inertia, torque, and angular momentum — the conserved quantity behind everything from a spinning top to a planet's orbit.

FIG_005
star
A Keplerian orbit: an ellipse with the star at one focus, the radius sweeping equal areas in equal times.

Gravitation ties it together. One inverse-square law explains falling apples and planetary orbits alike, and Kepler's empirical rules fall out of Newton's mechanics as a consequence.

From there the same framework reaches static equilibrium, fluids at rest and in flow, oscillations and travelling waves, and the thermal behaviour of matter — one language for the mechanical world.

Contents.

·
Progress.░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░
Articles done:0 / 51
Complete:0%
Notes written:0
Highlights:0