Laws Governing Motion
If I have made any valuable discoveries, it has been owing more to patient
attention than to any other talent.
2 LEARN
• Newton’s three laws of motion and how
they work together.
• What “state of motion,” “velocity,” and
“acceleration” are and how they relate to
each other.
• The relationship between force, mass,
and acceleration.
• To use Newton’s laws of motion to
predict what will happen in simple
interactions.
Isaac Newton
O
ur world is not static; it is constantly
changing. People walk, clouds drift, rain
falls, cars travel, and flowers grow. What
would life be if we and the world did not change
and progress from one state to another? A world
without change is impossible to imagine.
Change and motion are intertwined. Stop
for a moment and look around. Can you see
even one example of a change occurring with-
out motion being involved? The motion may be
slow and subtle, like a tree growing. Or the mov-
ing objects may be tiny particles too small to see,
like electrons moving about on an electric sign.
But in all cases, without exception, if something
changed, it or some part of it moved. Motion is
therefore fundamental to the world around us.
This leads us to ask, “What is the nature of
motion? Does it take place in a haphazard way
or does it follow a set of well-defined laws? If so,
what are those laws?”
Simple examples are often the most instruc-
tive so let’s consider one. Imagine a soccer ball
resting motionless in your front yard. You kick
it and it bounces down the street, going slower
and slower until it finally comes to a complete
stop, a few houses away. Why did the ball move
like that?
First, the ball was motionless until you
kicked it. So you might naturally conclude that
something at rest will move only if a force, like
a kick, is applied to it. This is correct. Forces are
always necessary to create or change motion.
But why did the ball stop? Perhaps it quit mov-
ing because the force from your kick “faded out.”
Indeed, more than two thousand years ago the
great Greek philosopher Aristotle (382–322
BC) wrote:
The moving body comes to a standstill when the
force which pushes it along can no longer so act
as to push it.1
But reflecting for a minute, you conclude
that Aristotle’s statement cannot be entirely
true. Yes, a force was necessary to get the ball
moving. However, the kick lasted for just a frac-
tion of a second and the ball stayed in motion
for a much longer period of time, well after the
1
Aristotle, Mechanics, 350.
kick was over. There must be more to this than
Aristotle’s explanation.
Aristotle was wrong. While a force of some
kind is necessary to create motion, force is not
necessary to sustain it. The brilliant Italian sci-
entist Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) understood
this. In his book, Discourses and Mathematical
Demonstrations Concerning the Two New Sci-
ences, he wrote: Aristotle
. . . [A]ny velocity once imparted to a moving Aristotle’s concept of force
body will be rigidly maintained as long as the being necessary to sustain
all motion was thought to be
external causes of acceleration or retardation are true for nearly 2,000 years.
removed2 . . .
In other words, an object will remain in
motion so long as no impeding forces, like fric-
tion, act against the motion. This basic under-
standing of motion—that it persists until
external forces alter it—was established as a cor-
rect principle by the mid 1600s.
The great natural philosopher and mathe-
Galileo Galilei
2
Galileo reasoned that if a ball rolling downhill gained
speed, and a ball rolling uphill lost speed, then a ball roll- Galileo understood the law
ing on a perfectly flat surface would roll forever at the same of inertia several decades
speed. before Isaac Newton.
17
18 2 Laws Governing Motion
Uniform Motion:
Motion at a constant speed
in a straight line.
State of Uniform
Motion:
The condition of an object
when no unbalanced forces
act upon it. A state of motion
always refers to being at rest
or in uniform motion.
Force:
A push or pull on an object.
matician Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727) built
upon this foundation. In 1687, at the urging
of colleagues, he laid out in the book Principia
Mathematica, arguably the greatest single work
of science ever produced, what have come to be
called Newton’s laws of motion.
2–1  The First Law of Motion
The first of Newton’s laws is a refined state-
ment of Galileo’s conclusion. It can be stated as
follows:
Every object at rest, or in uniform motion,
will remain in that state of motion unless
compelled to do otherwise by forces acting
upon it.
This statement of the law contains terms
that we will use frequently. Uniform motion
means motion at constant speed in a straight
line. This is the same as unaccelerated motion;
we will speak of acceleration later. State of
motion means its speed and direction. An
object moving with uniform motion will be said
to be in a state of uniform motion. Force refers
to a push or a pull. We will say more of forces
later in this chapter.
Newton’s first law applies equally well to
objects at rest and objects in uniform motion;
both respond to force in exactly the same way.
It may seem odd that there should be this simi-
larity. What could be more different in a state of
motion than moving along versus standing still?
We may understand the sameness of the
two cases, motion and rest, in the following
way. Suppose you are holding a rock in your
hand while riding along in a car at 70 miles per
hour. Here the rock is at rest—with respect to
you. However, it is not at rest with respect to
an observer standing on the shoulder of the
freeway, watching you speed past. That person
would say your handheld rock is moving uni-
formly at 70 miles per hour. So we can legiti-
Figure 2.1
Both driver’s heads jerk in a rear-end collision but in different directions. Why?
mately assign two different speeds to the rock,
zero and 70 miles per hour. Which is correct?
Both are, and we conclude that an object’s speed
is not a unique quantity like size or shape. Speed
depends on what we measure it against.
Of course it is possible to have one law
describe the motion of a rock when you ride
with it, and a second law describe its motion
when it is in a car moving past you. But Occam’s
Razor tells us it is simpler for the rock to obey
a single law of nature that does not depend on
what you are measuring the motion against. This
single law is Newton’s first law of motion and it
applies exactly the same to objects in uniform
motion as to those at rest. In fact the state of
rest is just the state of uniform motion with zero
speed.
It is obvious that an object at rest remains at
rest if it is left alone, yet the consequences can be
startling. A fun example is pulling a tablecloth
off a fully set dinner table while leaving the din-
ner service undisturbed. The plates and goblets
on the table are at rest and will remain at rest
unless the tablecloth “compels” them to do oth-
erwise. If the tablecloth is sufficiently smooth,
a quick jerk will break its frictional grip on the
dinner service, which remains undisturbed as
the cloth flies away. A less entertaining manifes-
tation of the law is a stopped car with passengers
being struck from behind. The passengers’ heads
momentarily remain at rest while the car and the
rest of their bodies are compelled to move for-
ward by the force of the impact, sometimes with
a harmful effect (Figure 2.1).
Newton’s first law may not be obvious
because the objects we deal with in everyday life
experience multiple forces. The force of gravity
seeks to pull everything down to the ground.
Frictional forces cause objects to slow down or
speed up. Newton and Galileo realized that the
motions of objects on Earth were constantly
changing under the influence of friction and
gravity. But they knew that if these forces could
 2–1 The First Law of Motion 19

SIR ISAAC NEWTON

Isaac Newton (1642–1727) was born on Christmas Day in Lincolnshire, England.

Born prematurely, he was a weak and frail baby, whom no one expected to live. His
father, a poor farmer who could not sign his own name, died a few months before
Newton’s birth. His mother had remarried by the time Newton was three years old
and left him to live with his grandmother. She rejoined him when he was 14 and tried
to make a farmer of him, but Newton was already preoccupied with mathematics. At
age 18 he enrolled at Cambridge University and began work for the Bachelor of Arts
degree. But in 1665 and 1666 Cambridge was closed because of the plague and
Newton retreated to his home in Lincolnshire for the duration. It was there that many
of the ideas were born that would revolutionize our concept of the world—ideas that
made Newton famous. Sir Isaac Newton
Newton was a complex character who seemed haunted by insecurity, possi- In 1687 Isaac Newton pub-
lished in the book Principia
bly stemming from his childhood. In his lifetime he would develop a powerful new
Mathematica the three laws
understanding of light and color, invent a new kind of reflecting telescope that had of motion that bear his name.
significant advantages over earlier instruments, and explain the motions of the heav-
ens. He would also write some 650,000 words on the subject of alchemy and some
1,300,000 words on Biblical and theological topics (Boorstin, The Discoverers, p.
407). He was a Unitarian, but a fellow of Trinity College and found it best, at last, to
leave Cambridge to become Master of the Mint from which he drew a comfortable
salary. He became president of the Royal Society in 1703, was knighted by Queen
Anne in 1705, and for the remainder of his life dominated intellectual life in England.
Alexander Pope summarizes the tribute to Newton with this couplet:

Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night:

God said, “Let Newton be!” and all was light.

One can juxtapose this description with Newton’s modest (and, some would say, uncharacteristic) statement to
Robert Hooke, “If I have seen further than others it is by standing upon the shoulders of Giants.”
Newton shared with Pythagoras a fascination with mathematics as the key to understanding the world. Newton’s
approach was to summarize his observations of nature into general mathematical statements. To deal with motion
and change he had to invent a whole new mathematics—calculus (which he called the theory of “fluxions”). Although
he was a creative genius who was constantly introducing new ideas and explanations, in his own mind he “frame[d]
no hypotheses,” meaning that he only summarized in formulas what could be confirmed experimentally. He made
no attempt to explain the physical reasons that caused the formulas to work.
Newton’s great contribution was the ability to see the world in a new way. It occurred to him, after watching an
apple fall, that gravitation was not strictly a terrestrial phenomenon, but rather a universal one. He looked at the
Moon, seeing what everyone had seen before him. Unlike others, however, he suddenly realized that the Moon, just
like the apple, was a falling object! True, it was moving sideways in its orbit as it fell, thus always missing Earth, but
it was falling, pulled toward Earth by the same gravity that pulled the apple toward Earth’s center. With that insight
Newton removed the distinction between celestial and terrestrial phenomena.
From Newton’s time forward, the bodies of the universe and their motions—be they planets, moons, or atoms—
were to be accounted for by universal laws that could be observed in experiments on earth, summarized in math-
ematical formulas, and then applied, to both understand and predict all the phenomena of the universe. The laws
would predict the future of each body in a decisive, deterministic way. In the hands of Newton’s followers and the
French philosophers who followed Descartes, the world began to assume the characteristics of a giant clockwork
whose motions could, in principle, be predicted and which were, therefore, “predestined.” This view would dominate
the philosophy of science until the twentieth century, when it was discovered that atomic particles do not obey New-
ton’s laws of motion. The modifications to Newton’s laws revealed an unpredictable randomness in the world that
breaks the deterministic grip that otherwise would rule.
Newton’s gift to science was to establish that we can find the laws of nature and use them to understand the
system and predict its future. This was, and is, a very powerful idea.
20 2 Laws Governing Motion

NORTH

Wind Vnet

Vwind

EAST
Vthrow

Figure 2.4
A baseball is thrown to the east in a wind going north. The
Figure 2.2 net velocity is the addition of the two velocity arrows, to the
An ice skater could go on forever without effort if friction were not present. northeast.

Velocity:
The speed in a particular
direction of a moving body.
Acceleration:
Rate of change of velocity
per unit time, or change of
velocity divided by the time
required for the change.
Centripetal:
Toward a center.
Figure 2.3
Why is the package “thrown”
to the outside of a turn? Is the
package really “thrown”?
be eliminated or canceled out by other forces, all
motion would be described only by Newton’s
first law. One can imagine, for example, that an
ice skater, once moving, could glide on forever
without ever slowing down if friction between
the blades of the ice skates and the ice could be
eliminated completely (Figure 2.2).
Speaking of ice, it is a frightening experi-
ence to approach a red traffic light at an ice-cov-
ered intersection, apply the brakes, then slide
on through without slowing down. After such
an experience, one is easily convinced that New-
ton’s first law of motion is valid. Turning a car
on ice is also a problem because, without fric-
tion between tires and road, the car continues
in a straight line no matter how the wheels are
pointed. We wear seat belts so that if we are in
an accident, we are held firmly to the car and
slow to a stop with the car instead of continu-
ing forward after the car’s forward motion ends,
striking the dashboard or windshield.
Turning a car around a corner illustrates
an interesting manifestation of Newton’s first
law. Suppose a car makes a left turn at a mod-
est speed. In the process a package placed next
to the driver slides across the seat to the door.
It may seem to a passenger sitting in the back
seat that the package has moved outward under
the influence of a force, but the truth is that the
package, acting in strict accordance with the first
law of motion, is simply moving straight ahead
while the car changes its motion under the influ-
ence of an inward force! (Figure 2.3)
2–2  Velocity and Acceleration
In section 2-1 we defined the state of
motion as an object’s speed and direction. Speed
and direction combined together are called
velocity. We represent velocity with an arrow
pointing in the direction of travel having a
length proportional to the speed. Two velocities
can be added by attaching the end of the second
arrow to the tip of the first (Figure 2.4).
A change in an object’s velocity is called
acceleration. Like velocity, acceleration also has
magnitude and direction, and can also be rep-
resented as an arrow. Acceleration can increase
speed, decrease speed (which is sometimes
called deceleration; Figure 2.5), or change the
direction of an object’s motion. Acceleration at
a right angle to an object’s velocity will change
the object’s direction without changing its speed
(Figure 2.6). Such acceleration is called cen-
tripetal acceleration. In general, a change from
uniform motion of any kind is termed an accel-
eration.
It is important to not confuse velocity with
acceleration. Velocity is distance in a particular
direction covered in a certain time, and has a
measurement like “miles per hour” or “meters
per second.” Acceleration is the rate at which
speed or direction changes, and has a measure-
ment like “miles per hour per second” or “meters
per second per second” (often just called “meters
per second squared.”)
As an example of how velocity and accel-
eration are related, consider a car heading due
west at 50 miles per hour. The driver then accel-
erates so that the car is going 70 miles per hour
4 seconds later. During this change in velocity it
accelerated at a rate of 5 miles per hour per sec-
ond (50 miles per hour + 5 miles per hour per
second ∞ 4 seconds = 70 miles per hour). Now
suppose the car is traveling at 10 miles per hour
and accelerates to 25 miles per hour in five sec-
 2–3 Force: Introduction to the Second Law of Motion 21

Velocity Acceleration = 0
a)

Acceleration = 0

Velocity
b)

Velocity Acceleration
c)

Velocity Acceleration
d)

Figure 2.5
Successive pictures, taken at equal time intervals, of a car in four different kinds of motion. The car is accelerating
in c and d but not in a and b as shown.

onds. Its acceleration in this case is 3 miles per Figure 2.6

hour per second. If it slowed from 50 to 40 miles The puck slides in a circle on
per hour in 2 seconds the acceleration would be Velocity an air hockey table without
friction. Its velocity (yellow
–5 miles per hour per second; the negative sign arrow) is tangential to the
circle, while its acceleration
denoting deceleration. Acceleration
(blue arrow) always points
The use of arrows to represent velocity and to the center of the circle
because the string is exerting
acceleration is very convenient but potentially an inward force on the puck.
confusing since they represent different quanti- The acceleration therefore
changes the puck’s direction
ties. Be careful to keep them straight! Note that but not its speed.
the velocity and acceleration arrows of a single
object can have any direction or length relative motion—motion with no acceleration—per-
to each other. sists unless forces compel it to change. So accel-
eration is caused by force. If you ever witness
2–3 
Force: Introduction to the Second an acceleration, you can know with complete
Law of Motion certainty that a net force of some kind made it
happen.
The intuitive definition of force, as noted in But the converse is not true. If a force is Force:
section 2-1, is that it is a push or a pull, exerted present it does not have to cause an accelera- A push or pull on an object.
by one object on another. Forces have direction, tion. If another force balances it out, there will
Net Force:
so when several forces act on the same object, be a net force of zero and no resulting change in
The sum of all the forces
we must consider the direction of each force as the state of motion. Each of us experiences this present on a body.
well as its strength when deciding what the total every day. Gravity exerts a force on you, pulling
force is. The total force acting on an object is you toward the ground. But as you sit motion-
called the net force. Forces pushing in the same less in your chair you do not accelerate toward
direction add together to increase net force, the ground because the chair pushes upward on
whereas forces acting in opposite directions add you with a balancing, equal force. So the net
against each other, decreasing net force. force on you is zero and you do not change your
The first law of motion states that uniform state of motion. Therefore, we say that accelera-
22 2 Laws Governing Motion
Unbalanced Forces:
The portion of the total force
that is unopposed by other
forces and so will cause an
acceleration. An unbalanced
force means that the net
force is not zero.
Mass:
The characteristic of a body
which determines how much
it accelerates when a force is
applied.
Figure 2.7
Both pitcher and catcher
exert forces that accelerate
the baseball. In which direc-
tion is each force applied?
tions are caused by unbalanced forces, which is
the net force, the amount of force not canceled
out by other, competing forces.
Forces are the third, and last, quantity rep-
resented by an arrow. The arrow points in the
direction of the push or pull with a length pro-
portional to the strength. Note that the unbal-
anced force and acceleration arrows of a single
object can have any length relative to each other
but they will always point in the same direction.
Unbalanced forces are acting whenever an
object moves faster, slower, changes direction, or
experiences any combination of speed and direc-
tion change. The kind of acceleration caused by
a particular force depends on the direction of
the force. If a force pushes on an object in the
same direction as its velocity, the object speeds
up, like the ball thrown by the pitcher in Figure
2.7. It slows down if a force opposes its velocity,
like the ball in the catcher’s mitt. Forces perpen-
dicular to the velocity cause a change in direc-
tion of motion with the object turning in the
direction of the force as with a curve ball or the
puck shown in Figure 2.6.
The strength of forces is measured in
pounds (lb) in the English system of units and
newtons (N) in the metric system. A newton is
approximately one quarter of a pound.
Earth
Forces cause accelerations, but what deter-
mines the amount of acceleration? The strength
of the force is, of course, a major factor. Stronger
forces produce greater accelerations. If a partic-
ular force causes an object to accelerate from
20 to 30 miles per hour in 10 seconds, a force
twice as strong would cause the same change in
5 seconds, or half the time. A force half as strong
would take 20 seconds to produce the same
acceleration.
2–4  Mass
There is also another factor. Suppose you
run out of gas driving your compact car to work
and coast to the side of the road near a pickup
truck, which is also out of gas. You and the
driver of the pickup truck decide to combine
efforts and push one of the vehicles to the near-
est gas station. With little thought you both
choose to push the compact car, because you
know that pushing the pickup would be a lot
harder. In other words, you know that an equal
amount of pushing force will make the smaller
vehicle accelerate more than the larger vehi-
cle. The property of an object that determines
how much it will accelerate in response to an
applied force is called mass. If mass is larger (e.g.
the truck), acceleration will be less than if mass
is smaller (the car). The greater the mass, the
smaller the acceleration for a given force.
Mass is a property unique to each object
and does not depend on other factors such as
location. A particular force applied to a mass
causes the same amount of acceleration no mat-
ter where the object is located, be it on the sur-
face of Earth, in interstellar space, or anywhere
else. If the same object experiences different
accelerations at different places, it is not because
the mass has changed, it is because the forces
acting on it are different (Figure 2.8).
Moon Mars

Figure 2.8
Suppose we have a fig that weighs 3.6 ounces on Earth
(1 newton). The same fig will weigh only .6 ounces (.165
newtons) on the Moon and 1.4 ounces (.38 newtons) on
Mars. The weight has changed in each location because
Earth, the Moon, and Mars each exert a different strength of
gravitational force. However, if you were to throw the fig hor-
izontally with the same force in each location, the fig would
experience the same horizontal acceleration regardless of
its weight, because the mass of the fig has not changed.

( 1 newton ) ( .165 newtons ) ( .38 newtons )

 2–5 The Second Law of Motion 23

STANDARDS OF MEASUREMENT

As we have already noted in this chapter, mass is the property of objects that determines
how much they accelerate in response to a force. To be useful, the concept of mass must
be made quantitative. To shop for dinner we need to know, for example, whether a sack of
potatoes has a mass of one kilogram or two kilograms. Quantities of mass are defined by
comparison to a standard. The standard measurement of one kilogram has been decreed
to be the mass of a specific piece of platinum-iridium which is kept under the watchful care
of the Bureau Internationals des Poids et Measures at Sevres, near Paris, France. To know if
you have one kilogram of potatoes, you must directly or indirectly compare the mass of your
potatoes with the mass of this piece of metal.
Obviously, neither you nor your grocer are going to take that sack of potatoes to France
to make sure you’re getting exactly one kilogram of spuds. To make weighing objects against
standards both exact and practical, copies of the standard kilogram are supplied to govern-
ment bureaus of standards around the world. Those bureaus, in turn, make exact-weight
copies—some of which are split in halves, quarters, etc.—to distribute to manufacturers who Standard Kilogram
make and sell commercial copies. You may have seen a box of “weights” in a chemistry labo-
The unit of mass, the kilogram (kg),
ratory that is the result of this process. remains the only base unit in the
One way to find the mass of your potatoes is to balance them against known weights. Put International System of Units that
your potatoes on one side of a scale and add standard masses to the other until both sides is still defined in terms of a physical
artifact. The standard was manu-
balance. The sum of the standard masses used equals the mass of the potatoes. You have
factured in 1879. It is stored in an
made your comparison accurately but indirectly with the standard kilogram secured in a bell evacuated chamber near Paris.
jar near Paris.
Length and time must also be given quantitative meaning by comparison to standards. For many years the standard meter was
the official measurement of a long bar of metal kept with the standard kilogram in France. Improved technology now allows us to
define it as how far light travels in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 seconds.
The ancient measure of time was the Sun’s position in the sky. The invention of clocks allowed greater accuracy, and was soon
followed by the “invention” of the “second,” defined as 1/86,400th of a day. Today we have more precise standards of time based
on atomic vibrations. One second is defined as 9,192,631,770 vibrations of a Cesium 133 atom.

Mass should not be confused with weight.
Weight is a measure of the force of gravity on a
particular mass. Weight does change with loca-
tion. This concept is explained more fully in
Chapter 3.
A term often used in speaking of motion
is “inertia.” Inertia is thought of as the prop-
erty that makes it hard to move an object from
rest, or that keeps it moving once it has started.
For this reason Newton’s first law is sometimes
called the “law of inertia.” But there is no quan-
tity that preserves an object’s state of motion; if
in motion or at rest it just stays that way. So it is
better not to regard “inertia” as a quantity in and
of itself, but rather as a qualitative description
for mass since mass represents the difficulty of
getting an object to change its state of motion.
2–5  The Second Law of Motion
Newton summarized the relation between
force, mass, and acceleration in a simple equa-
tion, termed Newton’s second law of motion:
Force = mass × acceleration
or just
F = ma Weight:
A measure of the force of
Alternatively, we may write it as gravity pulling on an object.
a = F/m
This equation, especially the second way
of writing it, shows that the acceleration of an
object is directly proportional to the net force
on it and inversely proportional to its mass. This
means that if you double the force on an object
without changing its mass, the acceleration
doubles. Or if you have two objects, the first of
which has twice the mass of the second, and the
24 2 Laws Governing Motion
same force is applied to both of them, the first
will accelerate at half the rate of the second. Can
you see how this is described by the equation?
To illustrate, suppose an object has a mass
of 100 kilograms. If it is pushed by a force that
causes it to accelerate at a rate of 5 meters per
second every second, then the second law of
motion tells us that the force is 100 × 5 = 500
newtons. Now suppose this same force of 500
newtons was applied to a mass of 50 kilograms.
The resulting acceleration would be 500/50 =
10 meters per second every second, or twice as
great.
We note that the first law of motion
follows naturally from the second law when
the applied force is zero. An object with no
force applied to it will not accelerate and thus
remain in its current state of motion. The
first law may be considered as a qualitative
statement about motion and the presence or
absence of force. The second law of motion
is quantitative. It says exactly how much the
motion of an object of mass m changes when
acted on by a force of magnitude F.
The significance of Newton’s second law of
motion cannot be overstated. It was the first uni-
versal principle discovered that enabled changes
observed in our physical world to be described
through mathematics.
2–6  The Third Law of Motion
The final observation of Newton that com-
pleted his laws of motion was that forces occur
only when two things interact with each other.
Nothing in isolation can exert a force on itself.
A car can accelerate only if its wheels touch the
road and push against it. If there is no interac-
tion between the tires and the pavement, there
is no force and the car does not accelerate. A
Figure 2.9
This experimental NASA aircraft accelerates
forward only because it pushes equally on the
exhaust accelerating backwards behind it.
boat cannot accelerate forward unless its pro-
peller acts against the water. An airplane flies
only because the angled propeller blades, or the
turbine blades in jet aircraft, push the air behind
them as they rotate. The forces that accelerate
a rocket result from the contact between the
rocket itself and the fuel that is burnt inside it
and thrust out behind (Figure 2.9).
In every interaction two forces arise, one
on each of the two interacting bodies. The mag-
nitude of each force is the same but they are
oppositely directed. This is Newton’s third law
of motion and can be stated as follows:
All forces result from interactions between
pairs of objects, each object exerting a
force on the other. The two resulting forces
have the same strength and act in exactly
opposite directions.
If you are familiar with this law you might
have expected to read, “For every action there is
an opposite and equal reaction.” We avoid using
this common phrase because it seems to imply
that one force starts the interaction and the
other arises as a result. That is not what the third
law says. The third law says that a single-sided
interaction cannot exist. It takes two objects to
interact and when they do, each object feels a
distinct force. So in every interaction there will
always be two forces, one on each object. These
two forces have the same strength but point in
opposite directions.
When the interacting objects have the same
mass, the two forces cause both objects to accel-
erate the same amount. For example, if a person
steps from a rowboat of similar mass to a dock,
they are accelerated toward the dock at the same
rate the boat is accelerated in the opposite direc-
tion. (Try not to fall in the water!)
However, if one object has more mass than

Figure 2.10
Log rolling requires an understanding of the Third Law of
Motion. Can you see why?
the other, it’s acceleration will be less. If its mass
is considerably more than the other, its resulting
acceleration can be so small the force on it seems
negligible. When you start to walk, for example,
the force that accelerates you comes from the
frictional interaction between your foot and
the floor. You push on the floor with your legs
and the resulting interaction manifests itself as
a forward force on you and a backward force on
the floor. As you accelerate forward, the floor
accelerates backward. But when have you ever
noticed a floor accelerating backward?
The floor is firmly attached to the building,
which is attached to Earth. So the floor’s effec-
tive mass is that of Earth itself. By the third law
of motion we can write:
Force of you on Earth =
Force of Earth on you
The second law of motion allows us to sub-
stitute mass times acceleration in place of force.
So we have the following:
Earth’s mass × Earth’s acceleration
= be solved and the resulting motion completely
Your mass × Your acceleration
Earth’s mass is 1023 times greater than your
mass. So by the above equation its acceleration
will be 1023 times less than yours. This amount
is too small to be measured, let alone noticed as
you sprint to class!
Earth’s overwhelmingly large mass makes it
seem to not accelerate at all, so let’s change the
situation a bit by putting a banana peel under
2–6 The Third Law of Motion 25
Figure 2.11
Using the Third Law of Motion,
explain why you’re no match
your foot. Assume, as in cartoons, and that a for a banana peel.
slick peel will cling to your foot but not to the
floor.
The equation now becomes:
Force of you on the banana peel =
Force of the banana peel on you
or
Banana peel’s mass × Banana peel’s acceler-
ation = Your mass × Your acceleration
Your mass has not changed but now you are
interacting with a banana peel having 1/1000
of your mass instead of Earth. The banana peel
accelerates backward 1000 times more than you
accelerate forward, you lose your footing and
your support, gravity takes over, and you fall flat.
These examples illustrate the interconnect-
edness of the laws of motion. The third law of
motion is a rule about forces and what they
can do. The third law of motion allows us to
create an equation of the forces between two
interacting objects, and the second law allows
us to change the equation to one of masses and
accelerations. In this way, the accelerations can
understood.
The laws of motion tell us how objects
respond to force but they give no information
about how forces arise from interactions, nor
how strong a force will be in any given interac-
tion. This information is expressed by force laws
that are unique for each of the four interactions
of nature. Gravity is considered in Chapter 3,
electromagnetism in Chapter 4, and the two
nuclear forces in Chapter 25.