Newton's First Law

Saturday, December 13, 2014

My experience with Newton's First Law was when I my family and I were cooking for Thanksgiving dinner.  My mom had prepared her traditional squash soup as a starter course.  My brother loves the soup and eats about half of it every year.  Once dinner was finally prepared, my brother was ready to get his hands on the soup.  He ran over to get the soup and could not wait to eat it.  He filled it to the brim of the bowl and ran back to the table.  On his way back he would sip (or gulp) bits of it.  But what he didn't know, was that the soup would splash back in his face.  This was due to newton's first law or the law of inertia.  The soup in the bowl was initially at rest when my brother was standing still with it.  The forces acting on it were equal, essentially meaning that it would remain where it is.  The force pulling it down was the gravitational pull on earth (9.8m/s2), and the force keeping it still was the table exerting a force up.  When he started to move forward, the soup was pulled backward by a force, that covered my brother with squash soup.  Because my brother was changing his state of motion, the force pulling back upon him was greater than the force pulling the soup forward.  The unbalanced forced caused the soup to spill.  My brother then stopped walking with the soup because it had gotten all over him.  When he suddenly stopped walking, the soup when flying forward and spilled in front of his path.  Because my brother was walking forward with the soup, the soup was then moving in the same direction and motion as he was.  When he suddenly stopped, the soup wanted to stay in that motion forward due to the unbalanced forced.  In this case, the force forward was greater than the force pulling back, so the change in motion caused the soup to spill once more.  The soup spilled due to newton's first law, which states that an object (soup) at rest will stay at rest and an object (soup) in motion will continue moving in a straight line at constant speed, if and only if, there are no unbalanced forces acting on the object (the net force would be zero).  The soup at rest, moving forward, and suddenly stopping all experienced newton's first law because of the law of interia making the object wanting to keep doing what it was doing without any changes.