PHYSICS PROJECT

NAME - MOHD FARHAN

CLASS - XI

SECTION- A4

ROLL NO.- 24

TOPIC- GALILEO'S LAW OF INERTIA

 CERTIFICATE

This is to certify that MOHD FARHAN of Class 11th , Rani Laxmi Bai
Memorial School Lucknow has successfully completed his project, in
physics for the AISSCE as prescribed by CBSE in the year 2021-2022.

DATE: 20/11/2022

Roll.no:24

Teacher Incharge :

Signature of External teacher Principal

 ACKNOWLEDGMENT

In the accomplishment of this project successfully many people have best owned
upon me their blessings and the heart pledged support this time I am willing to thank
all the people who have concerned with project.

Primarily I would thank my friends for being able to complete this project with
success. Then I would like to thank my principal Mrs. Neelam Shukla and physics
teacher Vivek Mishra sir whose valuable guidance has been the ones that helped me
patch this project and make its full proof success his suggestions and his instructions
has served as the major contributor towards the completion of the project.
 INTRODUCTION

GALILEO'S LAW OF INERTIA: It states that everybody continues to be in state

of rest or of uniform linear motion in a straight line unless compelled by some
external force to act otherwise. It is also known as NEWTON'S FIRST LAW OF
MOTION.He studied motion of objects on an inclined plane.

Objects:
● Moving down an inclined plane accelerate, while those
● Moving up retard
● Moving on horizontal plane is an intermediate situation.

Galileo concluded that an object moving on a frictionless horizontal plane must

neither have acceleration nor retardation, that is ,it should move with constant
velocity.

The case of ball moving on a horizontal plane in limiting case the ball travels and
infinite distance. In other words , it's motion never ceases. This is of course ,an
idealised situation. In practice the ball does come to a stop after moving a finite
distance on a the horizontal plane. Because of the opposing force of friction the ball
would continue to move with a constant velocity on the horizontal plane. Galileo
does arrived at a new inside on motion that had eluded total and those who followed
him. The state of rest and the state of uniform linear motion motion with constant
velocity are equivalent. In both cases there is no net force acting on the body. It is
incorrect to assume that a net force is needed to keep a body in uniform motion to
maintain a body in uniform motion we need to apply an external force to encounter
the frictional force so that the two forces some up to zero net external force.

To summarize if the net external force is zero the body at a body at rest continuous
remain at rest and a body in motion continuous to move with the uniform velocity.
This property of the body is called inertia. Inertia means 'resistance to change'. A
body does not change its state of rest or uniform motion unless and external force
compelles it to change that state.
 EXPERIMENT

GALILEO'S LAW OF INERTIA

Aim - To study GALILEO'S law of inertia using an inclined plane.

Material Required:-
● ball
● Inclined plane

Theory –
Galileo hypothesized that a falling object gains an equal amount of velocity in equal
intervals of time. This also means that the speed increases at a constant rate as it
falls. But, there was a problem in testing this hypothesis: it was impossible for
Galileo to observe the object’s free-falling motion and at the time, technology was
unable to record such high speeds. As a result, Galileo attempted to decelerate its
motion by replacing the falling object with a ball rolling down an inclined plane.
Since free-falling is basically equivalent to a completely vertical ramp, he assumed
that a ball rolling down a ramp would speed up in the exact same way as a falling
ball would.

Using a water clock, Galileo measured the time it took for the rolling ball to reach a
known distance down the inclined plane. After several trials, it was observed that
the time it took for the ball to roll the entire length of the ramp was equal to double
the amount of time it took for the same ball to only roll a quarter of the distance. In
short, if you were to double the amount of distance the ball traveled, it would travel
four times as far. Through this experiment, Galileo concluded that

If an object is released from rest and gains speed at a steady rate (as it would in free-
fall or when rolling down an inclined plane), then the total distance traveled by the
object is proportional to the time squared needed for that travel.

Types of inertia -
● Inertia of rest
● Inertia of motion
● Inertia of direction
Newton's first law expresses the principle of inertia: the natural behavior of a body
is to move in a straight line at constant speed. In the absence of outside influences,
a body's motion preserves the status quo.

The modern understanding of Newton's first law is that no inertial observer is

privileged over any other. The concept of an inertial observer makes quantitative the
everyday idea of feeling no effects of motion. For example, a person standing on the
ground watching a train go past is an inertial observer (or can be idealized as one to
a good approximation for many practical purposes). If the observer on the ground
sees the train moving smoothly in a straight line at a constant speed, then a passenger
sitting on the train will also be an inertial observer: the train passenger feels no
motion. The principle expressed by Newton's first law is that there is no way to say
which inertial observer is "really" moving and which is "really" standing still. One
observer's state of rest is another observer's state of uniform motion in a straight line,
and no experiment can deem either point of view to be correct or incorrect. There is
no absolute standard of rest.

The modern concept of inertia is credited to Galileo. Based on his experiments,

Galileo concluded that the "natural" behavior of a moving body was to keep moving,
until something else interfered with it. Galileo recognized that in projectile motion,
the Earth's gravity affects vertical but not horizontal motion. However, Galileo's idea
of inertia was not exactly the one that would be codified into Newton's first law.
Galileo thought that a body moving a long distance inertial would follow the curve
of the Earth. This idea was corrected by Isaac Beeckman, René Descartes, and Pierre
Gassendi, who recognized that inertial motion should be motion in a straight line.

The principle of inertia is one of the fundamental principles in classical physics. It

is still used today to describe the motion of objects and how they are affected by the
applied forces on them.

Inertia means an object will continue its current motion until some force causes its
speed or direction to change. The term is properly understood as shorthand for "the
principle of inertia" as described by Newton in his first law of motion.

The word "perseveres" is a direct translation from Newton's Latin. Other, less
forceful terms such as "to continue" or "to remain" are commonly found in modern
textbooks. The modern use follows from some changes in Newton's original
mechanics (as stated in the Principia) made by Euler, d'Alembert, and other
Cartesian.
Classical inertia

According to Charles Coulston Gillispie, inertia "entered science as a physical

consequence of Descartes' geometrization of space-matter, combined with the
immutability of God." The first physicist to completely break away from the
Aristotelian model of motion was Isaac Beeckman in 1614. The term "inertia" was
first introduced by Johannes Kepler in his Epitome Astronomiae Copernicanae
(published in three parts from 1617 to 1621); however, the meaning of Kepler's term
(which he derived from the Latin word for "idleness" or "laziness") was not quite
the same as its modern interpretation. Kepler defined inertia only in terms of
resistance to movement, once again based on the presumption that rest was a natural
state which did not need explanation. It was not until the later work of Galileo and
Newton unified rest and motion in one principle that the term "inertia" could be
applied to these concepts as it is today. The principle of inertia, as formulated by
Aristotle for "motions in a void", includes that a mundane object tends to resist a
change in motion. The Aristotelian division of motion into mundane and celestial
became increasingly problematic in the face of the conclusions of Nicolaus
Copernicus in the 16th century, who argued that the Earth is never at rest, but is
actually in constant motion around the Sun.

The term inertia comes from the Latin word iners, meaning idle, sluggish. The term
inertia may also refer to the resistance of any physical object to a change in its
velocity. This includes changes to the object's speed or direction of motion. An
aspect of this property is the tendency of objects to keep moving in a straight line at
a constant speed when no forces act upon them.

Inertia is one of the primary manifestations of mass, which is a quantitative property

of physical systems.

The effect of inertial mass:

● if pulled slowly, the upper thread breaks
● If pulled quickly, the lower thread breaks
● Concepts of inertia in Galileo's writings would later come to be refined,
modified, and codified by Isaac Newton as the first of his Laws of Motion
(first published in Newton's work, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia
Mathematica, in 1687):
Every body perseveres in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a right line, unless
it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed thereon.

Despite having defined the concept so elegantly in his laws of motion, Newton did
not actually use the term "inertia" to refer to his First Law. In fact, originally he
viewed the respective phenomenon as being caused by "innate forces" inherent in
matter, which resisted any acceleration. Given this perspective, and borrowing from
Kepler, Newton attributed the term "inertia" to mean "the innate force possessed by
an object which resists changes in motion"; thus, Newton defined "inertia" to mean
the cause of the phenomenon, rather than the phenomenon itself. However, Newton's
original ideas of "innate resistive force" were ultimately problematic for a variety of
reasons, and thus most physicists no longer think in these terms. As no alternate
mechanism has been readily accepted, and it is now generally accepted that there
may not be one that we can know, the term "inertia" has come to mean simply the
phenomenon itself, rather than any inherent mechanism. Thus, ultimately, "inertia"
in modern classical physics has come to be a name for the same phenomenon as
described by Newton's First Law of Motion, and the two concepts are now
considered to be equivalent.

Relativity

Albert Einstein's theory of special relativity, as proposed in his 1905 paper entitled
"On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies", was built on the understanding of
inertial reference frames developed by Galileo and Newton. While this revolutionary
theory did significantly change the meaning of many Newtonian concepts such as
mass, energy, and distance, Einstein's concept of inertia remained at first unchanged
from Newton's original meaning. However, this resulted in a limitation inherent in
special relativity: the principle of relativity could only apply to inertial reference
frames. To address this limitation, Einstein developed his general theory of relativity
("The Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity", 1916), which provided a
theory including noninertial (accelerated) reference frames.

In general relativity, the concept of inertial motion got a broader meaning. Taking
into account general relativity, inertial motion is any movement of a body that is not
affected by forces of electrical, magnetic, or other origin, but that is only under the
influence of gravitational masses. Physically speaking, this happens to be exactly
what a properly functioning three-axis accelerometer is indicating when it doesn't
detect any proper acceleration.
Theory of impetus

In the 14th century, Jean Buridan rejected the notion that a motion-generating
property, which he named impetus, dissipated spontaneously. Buridan's position was
that a moving object would be arrested by the resistance of the air and the weight of
the body which would oppose its impetus. Buridan also maintained that impetus
increased with speed; thus, his initial idea of impetus was similar in many ways to
the modern concept of momentum. Despite the obvious similarities to more modern
ideas of inertia, Buridan saw his theory as only a modification to Aristotle's basic
philosophy, maintaining many other peripatetic views, including the belief that there
was still a fundamental difference between an object in motion and an object at rest.
Buridan also believed that impetus could be not only linear but also circular in
nature, causing objects (such as celestial bodies) to move in a circle. Buridan's theory
was followed up by his pupil Albert of Saxony (1316–1390) and the Oxford
Calculators, who performed various experiments which further undermined the
Aristotelian model. Their work in turn was elaborated by Nicole Oresme who
pioneered the practice of illustrating the laws of motion with graphs.

Shortly before Galileo's theory of inertia, Giambattista Benedetti modified the

growing theory of impetus to involve linear motion alone:

"…[Any] portion of corporeal matter which moves by itself when an impetus has
been impressed on it by any external motive force has a natural tendency to move
on a rectilinear, not a curved, path."

Benedetti cites the motion of a rock in a sling as an example of the inherent linear
motion of objects, forced into circular motion.

Procedure-
● Firstly, roll the ball on the first inclined planes.
● Decrease the slope of the second inclined plane and the make the ball to roll
again.
● decrease to slope of the second plane to zero
Observations-:
We have used two inclined planes and made the ball roll down the first plane and
climb up the other. We concluded that, if the planes are smooth, the final height
achieved by the ball is nearly the same as the height through which it rolls from the
first plane. In the second experiment, the slope of the second inclined plane was
decreased and the ball was made to roll again. Here, the ball still reaches the same
height, and in doing so, it travels a longer distance.

When the slope of the second plane was decreased to zero, that is, the plane was
made horizontal, the ball was supposed to travel an infinite distance, that is the
motion never ceases. Although due to the opposing friction of the plane, the object
does come to rest after a finite distance but under ideal conditions, when there is no
friction, the ball would continue to move with constant velocity on the horizontal
plane. With this conclusion, the statements of Aristotle were proved wrong. We
concluded that it was incorrect to assume that a net force was needed to keep a body
in uniform motion and the state of rest and state of uniform motion as equivalent.

Precautions:
● The incline plane should be proper and tightly fixed.
● The quality of all equipment should be checked; all boards and strings that are
being used because if they break the weights can impact fingers and feet.
● Breakable objects should be removed from the immediate area. In case
someone accidentally bumps into those objects and breaks them
 BIBLIOGRAPHY

● www.byjus.com

● www.brainly.com

● NCERT Physics Book

● www.wikipedia.com