Flashcards: Classical mechanics

In physics, circular motion is a movement of an object along the circumference of a circle or rotation along a circular path.

In physics, the Coriolis force is an inertial force (also called a fictitious force) that acts on objects that are in motion relative to a rotating reference frame.

In physics, a gravitational field is a model used to explain the influence that a massive body extends into the space around itself, producing a force on another massive body.

In classical physics and special relativity, an inertial frame of reference (also inertial reference frame or inertial frame, Galilean reference frame or inertial space) is a frame of reference that describes time and space homogeneously, isotropically, and in a time-independent manner.

Absolute space and time is a concept in physics and philosophy about the properties of the universe.

A fictitious force, also called a pseudo force, d'Alembert force or inertial force, is an apparent force that acts on all masses whose motion is described using a non-inertial frame of reference, such as a rotating reference frame.

A rotation is a circular movement of an object around a center (or point) of rotation .

A potential well is the region surrounding a local minimum of potential energy.

In physics, the n-body problem is the problem of predicting the individual motions of a group of celestial objects interacting with each other gravitationally.

A hodograph is a diagram that gives a vectorial visual representation of the movement of a body or a fluid.

A non-inertial reference frame is a frame of reference that is undergoing acceleration with respect to an inertial frame.

Differential rotation is seen when different parts of a rotating object move with different angular velocities (rates of rotation) at different latitudes and/or depths of the body and/or in time.

Classical mechanics is the branch of physics used to describe the motion of macroscopic objects.

Newton's laws of motion are three physical laws that, together, laid the foundation for classical mechanics.

(This article is about inertia in physics. For other uses, see Inertia (disambiguation).) Inertia is the resistance of any physical object to any change in its state of motion; this includes changes to its speed, direction or state of rest.

In physics, jerk, also known as jolt, surge, or lurch, is the rate of change of acceleration; that is, the derivative of acceleration with respect to time, and as such the second derivative of velocity, or the third derivative of position.

In physics, angular momentum (rarely, moment of momentum or rotational momentum) is the rotational analog of linear momentum.

A first class constraint is a dynamical quantity in a constrained Hamiltonian system whose Poisson bracket with all the other constraints vanishes on the constraint surface in phase space (the surface implicitly defined by the simultaneous vanishing of all the constraints).

Newton's law of universal gravitation states that a particle attracts every other particle in the universe using a force that is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them.

Classical Mechanics (5th ed.) is a well-established textbook written by Thomas Walter Bannerman Kibble, FRS, (born 1932) and Frank Berkshire of the Imperial College Mathematics Department.

Linear motion (also called rectilinear motion) is a motion along a straight line, and can therefore be described mathematically using only one spatial dimension.

In Hamiltonian mechanics, a primary constraint is a relation between the coordinates and momenta that holds without using the equations of motion (, p.8).

In classical mechanics, the gravitational potential at a location is equal to the work (energy transferred) per unit mass that would be needed to move the object from a fixed reference location to the location of the object.

Isaac Newton's rotating spheres argument attempts to demonstrate that true rotational motion can be defined by observing the tension in the string joining two identical spheres.

In classical mechanics, the central-force problem is to determine the motion of a particle under the influence of a single central force.