About the Second Law of Motion
The second law of motion, also known Newton's second law, describes the change in an object's velocity in response to an unbalanced force. Physicists express the second law mathematically as F = ma, where "F" represents the force, "m" is the object's mass and "a" represents the acceleration or change in velocity.
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Velocity and Acceleration
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Velocity represents the ratio of the distance, d, an object travels to the time, t, required to travel that distance. Mathematically, this is represented by v = d / t. Acceleration represents the change in an object's velocity divided by the time required for the change.
Acceleration and the Second Law
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Physicists refer to velocity as a "vector quantity," which means velocity contains both a direction and magnitude component. This necessarily makes acceleration a vector quantity as well. As a consequence, a change in direction technically represents a change in velocity as well as a change in acceleration. This is true even if the speed, as measured in miles per hour or meters per second, remains constant.
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Implications
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Newton's second law ultimately indicates that an object to which a force is applied will move in the direction of the applied force, if it moves at all. It further indicates that the acceleration exhibited by the object will be proportional to the applied force and that acceleration will vary inversely with the object's mass, i.e., lighter objects will accelerate faster than heavy objects.
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