Commonly Asked Questions in Physics

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Classical Mechanics

All around us we see bodies in motion, and a big part of physics concerns how and why things move the way they do. Quite a lot of what you see can be explained by classical mechanics, a branch of physics that goes back to the seventeenth century. Many of the basic concepts and ideas came from Isaac Newton (1642–1727), so physicists often use the term Newtonian mechanics interchangeably with classical mechanics. Since the days of Newton, the field has been revised and expanded to include new concepts, particularly energy, which along with better computational methods has improved the power of classical mechanics to explain what we see and to make predictions about how physical systems will behave. Perhaps surprisingly, much ...