How is force related to mass

Key Takeaways Key Points Force is stated as a vector quantity, meaning it has elements of both magnitude and direction. Mass and acceleration respectively.

Dynamics is the study of the force that causes objects and systems to move or deform. External forces are any outside forces that act on a body, and internal forces are any force acting within a body. Key Terms force : A force is any influence that causes an object to undergo a certain change, either concerning its movement, direction or geometrical construction.

Mass Mass is a physical property of matter that depends on size and shape of matter, and is expressed as kilograms by the SI system. Learning Objectives Justify the significance of understanding mass in physics.

Mass is central in many concepts of physics, including:weight, momentum, acceleration, and kinetic energy. Key Terms mass : The quantity of matter which a body contains, irrespective of its bulk or volume. It is one of four fundamental properties of matter. It is measured in kilograms in the SI system of measurement. Licenses and Attributions. CC licensed content, Shared previously. By substituting standard metric units for force, mass, and acceleration into the above equation, the following unit equivalency can be written.

The definition of the standard metric unit of force is stated by the above equation. The table below can be filled by substituting into the equation and solving for the unknown quantity. Try it yourself and then use the click on the buttons to view the answers. The numerical information in the table above demonstrates some important qualitative relationships between force, mass, and acceleration. Comparing the values in rows 1 and 2, it can be seen that a doubling of the net force results in a doubling of the acceleration if mass is held constant.

Similarly, comparing the values in rows 2 and 4 demonstrates that a halving of the net force results in a halving of the acceleration if mass is held constant. Acceleration is directly proportional to net force. Furthermore, the qualitative relationship between mass and acceleration can be seen by a comparison of the numerical values in the above table. Observe from rows 2 and 3 that a doubling of the mass results in a halving of the acceleration if force is held constant.

And similarly, rows 4 and 5 show that a halving of the mass results in a doubling of the acceleration if force is held constant. Acceleration is inversely proportional to mass. Whatever alteration is made of the net force, the same change will occur with the acceleration. Double, triple or quadruple the net force, and the acceleration will do the same.

On the other hand, whatever alteration is made of the mass, the opposite or inverse change will occur with the acceleration.

Double, triple or quadruple the mass, and the acceleration will be one-half, one-third or one-fourth its original value. In most cases, forces can only be applied for a limited time, producing what is called impulse. For a massive body moving in an inertial reference frame without any other forces such as friction acting on it, a certain impulse will cause a certain change in its velocity.

The body might speed up, slow down or change direction, after which, the body will continue moving at a new constant velocity unless, of course, the impulse causes the body to stop. There is one situation, however, in which we do encounter a constant force — the force due to gravitational acceleration, which causes massive bodies to exert a downward force on the Earth.

Notice that in this case, F and g are not conventionally written as vectors, because they are always pointing in the same direction, down. The product of mass times gravitational acceleration, mg , is known as weight , which is just another kind of force.

Without gravity, a massive body has no weight, and without a massive body, gravity cannot produce a force. Because 'mass' measures the degree in which matter resists a change in velocity. Unsurprisingly, it is proportional to the amount of material the more material is there, the harder it is to move it. Now, sometimes you see "fictitious forces" - like the centrifugal force, which yield the same acceleration independent of mass.

This is because those are not really external forces, but rather an outcome of forgetting to account the acceleration of your view point as in sitting on the surface of a rotating sphere. This is called "non-inertial frame of reference" by physicists. The strange fact is that Gravity itself seems like a 'fictitious force'. Einstein's relativity theory emanates from that, with the claim that Gravity is indeed a feature of the structure of curved space-time, and not really a 'Force'.

So the potential which produces that electrostatic force is just treated the same as any potential or force in classical mechanics. I suspect you are being thrown off by considering gravitational force, which is proportional to the mass of both objects, so that acceleration of an object has no dependence on it's mass.

In general forces don't necessarily depend on the mass of objects, so the object's mass won't generally conveniently cancel like that. The question is whether the answers are true where it is really important, in General Relativity, and not just Newtonian physics.

The answers provided so far are correct. Electric charge does not couple directly to the gravitational field, but rather to the electromagnetic field.

The equivalence principle in essence says that the source of the gravitational field, the gravitational mass, is proportional to the inertial mass, and thus one cannot distinguish uniform gravitational fields from accelerated frames.

But there is no such equation in General Relativity GR. So the question is, do we know that the same is true in GR? We know it should be, that GR was constructed to obey the equivalence principle for gravitational fields. The way that comes about is how Maxwell's equations, and the equations of motion, were included in the so called Einstein Maxwell equations. The Maxwell's equations were included in the Einstein equations as part of the right hand side, the stress energy tensor, and the covariant Maxwell's equations.

The Einstein Maxwell equations, and the covariant Maxwell's equations 'simply' replace commas by semicolons, i.