Latest Classical mechanics Stories

The next time you are in Pisa, try looking at its tower from a different perspective.Newton's laws of motion predict that an object will fall when its centre-of-mass lies beyond its base of support. But how does your brain know whether the tower will fall or not?Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany recently reported in the journal PLoS ONE that although the physical laws governing object stability are reasonably well represented by the...

GRANTS PASS, Ore., Jan. 10, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- In "Tidal Forces: A Different Theory," as presented at Caltech to the American Physical Society on Oct. 30, 2010, Roy Masters revisits the theories describing the moon raising the tides by virtue of pull gravity combined with the moon's centripetal angular momentum. Masters shows that if gravity is considered the attractive interaction between individual bodies, then a working moon would have fallen to earth eons ago. Masters, founder of the...

A new experiment proposed by physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) may allow researchers to test the effects of gravity with unprecedented precision at very short distances"”a scale at which exotic new details of gravity's behavior may be detectable.Of the four fundamental forces that govern interactions in the universe, gravity may be the most familiar, but ironically it is the least understood by physicists. While gravity's influence is well-documented on...

Bridging the classical/quantum divideDartmouth researchers have discovered a potentially important piece of the quantum/classical puzzle "“ learning how the rules of physics in the quantum world (think smaller than microscopic) change when applied to the classical world (think every day items, like cars and trees).In a study published in the July 1 issue of the journal Nature, Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy Alex Rimberg and his colleagues describe one example of the...

In a study published in the July 1 issue of the journal Nature, Dartmouth researchers describe one example of the microscopic quantum world influencing--even dominating, they say--the behavior of something in the macroscopic classical world."One major question in physics has to do with the connection between the microscopic and macroscopic worlds," said Alex Rimberg, associate professor of physics at Dartmouth College.In the microscopic world, tiny sub-atomic particles such as...

A team of nanotechnology researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University has used friction force microscopy to determine the nanoscale frictional characteristics of four atomically-thin materials, discovering a universal characteristic for these very different materials. Friction across these thin sheets increases as the number of atomic layers decreases, all the way down to one layer of atoms. This friction increase was surprising as there previously was no theory to...

Friction in human relations is all too obvious and prevalent, but friction in physics has had a "secret life" of its own that has now been revealed by scientists at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.In an article appearing in the journal Nature (with a further reference to it in Nature Physics), the scientists show how frictional strength evolves from extremely short to long time scales. The new information could be useful in assessing a wide range of natural and man-made phenomena...

GARDINER, N.Y., June 23 /PRNewswire/ -- "The Universal Properties of Acceleration: Did Einstein Look the Wrong Way?" (published by AuthorHouse) is about gravity. Author Barry Lebost proposes a new law in physics stating "that all acceleration and its intimate partner inertia have the same general properties everywhere in the universe including the surfaces of planets and stars." Lebost demonstrates that when universal property tests are performed upon the surface of planet Earth, the test...

The U.S. space agency and Honeywell Inc. say they are launching the 2009 tour of their award-winning hip-hop science education program FMA Live! The traveling science concert will reach more than 17,000 middle-school students during its 10-week, 20 city U.S. tour, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration said. Named for Sir Isaac Newton's second law of motion -- force = mass times acceleration -- FMA Live! uses professional actors, original songs, music videos and interactive...

Scientists say they have discovered the mechanism that causes tiny objects to levitate, a discovery that may pave the way for the ability to create nanotechnology machines in the future. The apparent levitation was observed as a result of repulsive force between a thin sheet of silica and a small gold-plated bead, Harvard physicist Federico Capasso and colleagues reported in the journal Nature.This so-called Casimir force of repulsion could be replicated and used to create friction-free...