Physics Unit 5

Today, we started Unit 5, which revolves around forces in equilibrium. Force is either a push or pull and is a vector quantity. Force in equilibrium is when the force is balanced. We learned about different kinds of forces as well as the Newton's first law of physics, which has to do with inertia; it states that an object in motion will stay unless acted upon by an outside, unbalanced force. Inertia, by the way, is an object's ability to continue doing what they are doing.

We reviewed vectors and how to solve them (woohoo, trigonometry). We learned that vectors would be equivalent if they have the same magnitude and the same direction. Basically, if two vectors start at the same spot and end at the same spot, they're equivalent. While there are diagonal vectors, we only focused on how to make vectors into right triangles by drawing extra vectors, in order to make it easier to solve with vectors. By having the vectors as right triangles, we can use SOH CAH TOA to find the lengths of vectors or their angles.

We also learned the three steps to using vectors to solve for sides or angles, which is:

1. Break up diagonals (Bureku) into x and y.

2. Add all values together to get a sum (axes are still independent) resultant.

3. UKERUB (Bureku backwards) - take x and y sums and create a new vector.