Name: MIR FAIYAZ HOSSAIN

SUBJECT – PHYSICS
TOPIC – PROJECTILE MOTION (AS PHYSICS )
CENTRIPETAL MOTION ( A2 PHYSICS)

EMSB (instructor’s form attachment ).

 Does the moon fall?

You might have heard about Sir Isaac Newton’s famous apple
story, but the story you know is an over-simplified version.

When Newton saw an apple fall, he didn’t just conclude that

gravity exists. He asked another question – a very interesting
one.
“If an apple falls so why can't the moon also fall?”

Newton thus began to think about this which lead to the

conclusion that gravity exists and acts on every object, but
the most important thing he discovered is that the moon is
falling too !

So the question is , why don’t we see the moon getting closer?

Recent study has found that the moon is actually moving away
from the Earth . Was Newton wrong?

OK now let’s apply our knowledge about physics (Newtonian

mechanics) to find out whether Newton is right or not.
1) The parabolic motion of a ball.

when you kick a ball from a height, the ball doesn’t

keep going in a straight line. You can try this using a
football. The ball will FALL down.

However, you might have noticed that the ball doesn’t

fall down taking a straight path. Rather, it follows
curved path, and the shape of this curve is known as a
parabola. The distance the ball travels depends on the
initial velocity of the ball and the angle at which the
ball was kicked. (hence, we use the formula
R=u2⋅sin2θ/g)
this diagram might look very complicated, and you don’t
have to study this, it is here just to prove that as the
launch angle increases, the distance traveled by the
ball also increases (up to 45”).

If the launch angle remains same, the range of the ball

depends on the launch velocity.
Now comes the fun part. look at the figure below.

As you increase the speed of the ball, the distance

travelled by the ball increases.
The shape of the Earth is a sphere; hence the ball
follows the curvature of the Earth.
The figure Above shows a ball being launched with
different velocities from the north pole.
Notice how, as you increase the velocity, the ball
moves a greater distance (from the pole towards the
equator), however it keeps falling back to the earth.

The force of gravity is ALWAYS towards the

center of the Earth.
At a certain velocity, the ball curves at such a degree
that it returns to the point from where it was launched
(the last circular path of the figure above).

2) The centripetal motion of the ball.

The ball now satisfies the two conditions for

centripetal motion.

i) the ball is already in motion

ii) the ball is constantly experiencing a force towards
the center of the Earth, and this force is always acting
perpendicular

The ball is now moving in a circular path , and the

motion of the ball is hence called centripetal motion.

The ball will never hit the Earth as long as it keeps on

moving .
A question that might arise is how does this “ forever”
motion conserve energy ?
The answer to this is actually simple.
The ball doesn’t do any work.
we know that Work done = force x distance moved in
the direction of the force.

The force on the ball, acts perpendicular to the motion

of the ball, which means that the distance moved by by
the ball towards the force (towards the center of the
Earth) is ZERO.
hence Work done = 0.

THE BALL AND THE MOON. (The Giant

Impactor Theory)

The most important question is how did the moon start

orbiting the Earth. Unlike the ball , the moon isn’t
something we can carry and launch at a velocity so that
it starts to orbit the Earth .
The giant impactor theory states that when the earth
was on its earliest stage , the Earth got hit by a giant
celestial body , which caused a chunk of the earth and
the body to be ejected with very large velocity.
This chunk now is known as the moon . just like the ball,
the moon was launched from the earth, and the moon is
always experiencing a force towards the center of the
earth, hence the moon is exhibiting centripetal motion.

the moon is however , slowly moving away from the

earth ( a very interesting topic , indeed , but some
other time ) but its direction of motion still remains
perpendicular to the force , hence it keeps on orbiting
the Earth .

Newton’s Conclusion
Newton was actually right. The moon is falling
towards the earth. Technically, it is not true,
it’s just the fact that the moon keeps on missing the
earth and instead keeps moving in a circular path. The
moon falls around the Earth !
 The experiment with the ball proved that if the
velocity is large enough, the ball will eventually not hit
the earth as it kept hitting when the velocity was
small. The moon is just like the ball, falling, yet not
falling!

Fun fact: Satellites that orbits the Earth were

launched using the principles of the “ball experiment”
where a rocket is used to obtain that large velocity.

Image sources - google images.

All explanatory materials other than the images are arranged by Mir Faiyaz Hossain , please do not copy them
or use them without permission.