Inertia

Inertia, more commonly known as Newton's first law.

I'll start with this picture and explain about it farther down.

Have you ever been sitting on a couch, watching your favorite show and the phone rings but the phone is in the other room and you don't feel like getting up to get it...well... that is inertia.

A very simple summary of the rule is "What ever the object tends to be doing at any given time, it wants to keep doing that."

The heavier, more massive, the object, the more inertia it has.  

Picture a piano...try to move it..pretty tough..now picture a piano moving.. it'll be pretty hard to stop.  That is an example of Inertia.

Another way of looking at it is this..

Picture yourself pushing car.. now try to push it as hard and as fast as you can.  If you push the car hard and fast enough you can actually put a dent in the trunk as you push it because the car didn't move as you were pushing it because of it's large inertia/mass...

Now picture the same thing but in a larger setting.. and thanks to Mythbusters you can actually see it.

The theme of this show..and overall a great critical thinking show at that.. was to try to have two trucks hit a car on opposites sides at the same time and crush it.  The problem was they couldn't time it right.  The trucks never hit the car at the same time.  So thanks to their success they have an almost unlimited budget and they were able to do something awfully cool. They were able to

 do this experiment with a rocket sled.  They put a car up against a brick wall and then tried to slam a rocket sled into the car to squish the car at both ends... seems logical... you push a car at one side the car gets pushed into the wall, so  both ends gets squished at the same time... well they forgot to remember Newton's First law..INERTIA.  The car is being pushed so quickly that the cars inertia is easily visible and the car refuses to move.

Here are three picturess from the above video.. you have to watch the video to truly see the effect...

Notice how the back wheel hardly moved while it was being "squished".  The cars inertia allowed it to be crushed on one side and not dented at all on the other.

Now that is cool...

In future posts I'll get more into inertia but what a great introduction to Inertia...

 and you have to admit..

Ugottaluvphysics.