Gravity: We might have been getting it wrong this whole time

Symmetry has been one of the guiding principles in physicists' search for fundamental laws of nature. What does it mean that laws of nature have symmetry? It means that laws look the same before and after an operation, similar ...

Discovery of new ice may change our understanding of water

Researchers at UCL and the University of Cambridge have discovered a new type of ice that more closely resembles liquid water than any other known ices and that may rewrite our understanding of water and its many anomalies.

LHC creates matter from light

The Large Hadron Collider plays with Albert Einstein's famous equation, E = mc2, to transform matter into energy and then back into different forms of matter. But on rare occasions, it can skip the first step and collide ...

The strength of the strong force

Much ado was made about the Higgs boson when this elusive particle was discovered in 2012. Though it was touted as giving ordinary matter mass, interactions with the Higgs field only generate about 1 percent of ordinary mass. ...

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Force

In physics, a force is any influence that causes an object to undergo a change in speed, a change in direction, or a change in shape. In other words, a force is that which can cause an object with mass to change its velocity (which includes to begin moving from a state of rest), i.e., to accelerate, or which can cause a flexible object to deform. Force can also be described by intuitive concepts such as a push or pull. A force has both magnitude and direction, making it a vector quantity. Newton's second law, F=ma, was originally formulated in slightly different, but equivalent terms: the original version states that the net force acting upon an object is equal to the rate at which its momentum changes.

Related concepts to force include: thrust, which increases the velocity of an object; drag, which decreases the velocity of an object; and torque which produces changes in rotational speed of an object. Forces which do not act uniformly on all parts of a body will also cause mechanical stresses, a technical term for influences which cause deformation of matter. While mechanical stress can remain embedded in a solid object, gradually deforming it, mechanical stress in a fluid determines changes in its pressure and volume.

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