Momentum

Momentum is a vector quantity (which means momentum has both magnitude and direction) that can describe the energy of a moving object. Generally, you can regard momentum as an internal energy of an object that is moving.For example, a falling basketball has momentum.                                                                                                                                                     Momentum can be calculated through the formula p = mv, where p refers to momentum, m is mass of the object, while v means velocity. We are not going to talk about the calculations since it is so easy that all you need to do is mass times velocity. But we are going to discuss how to compare momentum between different moving objects with different mass and velocity. The first case is same mass but differnt velocities. Like in World Cup, two soccer players kick the same ball, but the power they use to kick the ball is different (besides the direction can be differnt) , so the ball will travel at different velocities. So since it is the same ball, so the faster the object (the ball in this case) moves, the greater the momentum will be (provided that the mass is the same). The second case is, same velocity but differnt mass. Here is a good example: a man kicks a football towards the wall the wall didn't collapse, but a drunk driver drives his car and crash into the wall at the same velocity a football goes will make the wall collapse. A football is obviously lighter than a car. So according to the formula mass times velocity, the moving football will have a much slower momentum in this case compared to the moving heavy car.                                                                                                                         Momentum is an internal energy of an object that is moving, as what is mentioned previously. So we will see the collapse of the wall when a car crash into the wall because its momentum is high enough to damage the wall, while the lighter football travlelling at the same velocity does not have that much momentum to achieve this.
  • Subject : Science
  • Topic : Physics
  • Posted By : Jason

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