Questions tagged [classical-mechanics]
For questions about Classical Mechanics - a branch of Physics involving the study of the motion of macroscopic bodies under the influence of Forces
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In Newton's time, were observations accurate enough to corroborate that the Sun orbits the common center of mass of Sun-Jupiter?
The context of the question:
In Newton's time the distances between the celestial bodies of the Solar system were known.
On the assumption that the inverse square law of gravity holds good:
From the ...
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Who stated Impulse-momentum theorem and work-energy theorem for the first time? [closed]
I personally believe that after finding F = ma from Newton's second law we can write acceleration in two ways.
First Way a = dv/dt
F = m(dv/dt) ........ equation 1
Fdt = mdv
after integrating we get,
∫...
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Origin of the concept of "impulse"
Question:
So, I recently looked back into my physics textbook and found the concept of "impulse" there. Now, upon reading the explanation in the textbook and several definitions online, I ...
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Does Navier-Stokes formulation change over timeline?
In this article write:
"the equation was rediscovered or re-derived at least four times, by Cauchy in 1823, by Poisson in 1829, by Saint-Venant in 1837, and by Stokes in 1845"
"To ...
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F = ma -- How was did we come to understand that this compact form expressed what Newton said in words?
My understanding is, Newton in the 17th century did not use this formula but rather said, in words basically that if you apply a force it will cause a mass to accelerate in the direction of that force....
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Would they have known you can't go faster than light in 1790 [duplicate]
I came across this short: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/LjBaPxutpQo where Brian Cox says the idea of black holes dates back to 1790. It stemmed according to it from escape velocity and that you could ...
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What was John Cantius' contribution to the theory of impetus?
According to Wikipedia, the theory of impetus, which was a precursor to the modern concepts of inertia and momentum, was developed in the West by Jean Buridan, and further developed by John Cantius (...
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Hamilton's derivation for the characteristic function in his essay
In Hamilton's "on a general method in dynamics", he starts with varying the function $U$ and writes the equation:
$$\delta U=\sum m(\ddot x\delta x+\ddot y\delta y+\ddot z\delta z)$$
Then he ...
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Did Newton know about non-inertial frames?
When answering a Physics.SE question, I made a claim that Newton realized that $F=ma$ worked in some frames, which are called "inertial frames." Nowadays, we know that there are non-...
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Reconstruction of Newton's axioms
Hilbert reconstructed Euclid's axioms. Is there an equivalent restructuring of Newton's axioms, or are they considered consistent?
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How does Legendre transformation in classical mechanics relate to Adrien-Marie Legendre?
I tried to look for the history of Legendre transformation, which transformed Lagrangian mechanics to Hamiltonian mechanics, usually formulated as
$$
\begin{cases}
p_i = \frac{\partial L}{\partial v_i}...
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How the concept of Momentum was discovered?
As we already know that the concept of Momentum was discovered before Newton discovered his laws of motion, but my question is $\rightarrow$ How they discovered the relationship p=mv without knowing ...
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Are similarities in notation between Hamiltonian mechanics and Box-Jenkins time series forecasting accidental?
The 1833 formalism of Hamiltonian mechanics prescribes phase space coordinates (p,q) as momenta. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamiltonian_mechanics
The Box-Jenkins method (1970) of time series ...
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How did Newton, Lagrange, Hamilton and others ideate their mechanical formulations?
What exactly did Lagrange do, historically? This is very relevant but the accepted answer just does similar speculations based on contextual details that I have done. It was mentioned that part of ...
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Where does motion happen for Galileo?
I have a question from the first two paragraphs of this answer:
Newton's idea of absolute space simply appeared as an answer to the following question: What is an inertial system? Saying that an ...
