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CHAPTER 1
Motion
CHAPTER’s
Objectives
Motion was the first natural event that triggered human
interest to study natural phenomena long before
recording time. To the ancient people, everything in the
universe seems to move from one position to another
and in a manner, which became part of their everyday
life experience.
The ancient Greeks, between 600B.C. and 300B.C.
learnt a great deal of motion based on philosophical
views of cause and effect. Aristotle is one of their own
who wrote many theories about motion that captured
people attention until the 16th century.
To introduce the properties of
motion (position, speed and
velocity, and acceleration)
To use the metric (or SI) system
of measurement and to learn
In the mid of 16th century a modern and correct view of
how to convert units
motion was established. Many contributed to this new
understanding, but the outstanding contribution of
To differentiate between speed
Galileo and then Newton in the 17th century was
and velocity
significant.
To differentiate between
velocity and acceleration
To learn how to analyze
problem statements and to
translate the information into a
recipe, and
To develop a problem solving
skill.
Mechanics is the science of motion. It is divided into
kinematics, which deals with motion with no reference
to forces and dynamics that studies the effect of forces
on motion. This chapter deals with kinematics only.