Question

Part 1: State and explain 5 everyday situations using Newton

Answer 1

a)An object at rest tends to stay at rest and an object in motion tends to stay in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.
Blood rushes from your head to your feet while quickly stopping when riding on a descending elevator.
The head of a hammer can be tightened onto the wooden handle by banging the bottom of the handle against a hard surface.
A brick is painlessly broken over the hand of a physics teacher by slamming it with a hammer. (CAUTION: do not attempt this at home!)
To dislodge ketchup from the bottom of a ketchup bottle, it is often turned upside down and thrusted downward at high speeds and then abruptly halted.
Headrests are placed in cars to prevent whiplash injuries during rear-end collisions.
While riding a skateboard (or wagon or bicycle), you fly forward off the board when hitting a curb or rock or other object which abruptly halts the motion of the skateboard.

b)Below are some of the examples:

Law 1: An onbject will move at a constant velocity unless acted upon by an outside force.

Example 1: The Saturn V rocket sits on the pad until the engines fire (constant velocity of zero).

Example 2: The spacecraft coasts to the Moon after an initial engine firing; it does not need to fire its engines the whole way because there is no atmospheric drag to slow it down. (This is a bit of an oversimplification, because in practice the gravitational force from the Earth and the Moon exerts changes in velocity, but the principle of 'fire engines and then switch them off and coast' is sound.)

Law 2: Change in velocity is proportional to the force applied.

Example 1: The course correction burn (the one where they are using the Earth as a reference) has to be precisely timed and the spacecraft has to be precisely oriented to produce the desired change in velocity.

Law 3: For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

There are countless examples of this, as it is the fundamental basis of rocket propulsion. Several examples are seen ranging from the launch of the Saturn V to the various course correction burns and the wild motions caused by the firing of the RCS thrusters after the explosion.

For other examples, watch when the crew first take off their helmets and gloves in zero gravity and bat them around.