Above is an image from the program for the homework assignment assigned Tuesday or Wednesday. It is located at http://www.ph.utexas.edu/~andye/newtonia/. This program explores… Newton’s Laws of Motion. More on Newton’s Laws can be found here:
- Laws of motion from Rice Uni
- and from Nasa…
- Phet Simulation
- LUNAR LANDER!!
- Can you find better sites on Newton’s Laws than these?
Richard Feynman on the significance of Newton’s Laws of motion:
The discovery of the laws of dynamics, or the laws of motion, was a dramatic moment in the history of science. Before Newton’s time, the motions of things like planets were a mystery, but after Newton’s there was complete understanding. Even the slightest deviations from Kepler’s laws, due to the perturbations of the planets, were computable. The motions of pendulums, oscillators with springs and weights in them, and so on, could all be analyzed completely after Newton’s laws were enunciated.
Newton’s Laws of motion were laid down formally in Newton’s Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica in 1687.
And finally, have you seen 2001 A Space Odyssey? It’s an amazing film and a particular sequence has a lot of the same physical concepts artfully portrayed. It’s worth a watch! If you don’t have youtubes (being behind the AISD firewall) I posted that video on my UT webspace. How are the movements (sometimes coordinated, sometimes not) like or not like the movements/motions/etc. that we experienced in the Newtonia program in class and in homework?
