Inertia Example

According to the glossary in Conceptual Physics eleventh edition by Paul G. Hewitt, inertia is “Sluggishness or apparent resistance of a object to change its state of motion.” This video is an example of inertia in a few different ways. The fist and obvious way is the at rest dishes. They are not in motion to start with, and they stay stagnant throughout this clip. The cloth is pulled out from under them, and they stay still. However, for inertia to be occurring, the subject does not have to be still. The book shelf is another example of inertia, but in this case, it moves. When the boy runs into it, the bookshelf falls to the ground. The boy initiated the movement for the bookshelf when he ran into it. Had there been no floor, the bookshelf would have kept falling due to the force of gravity (it would not miraculously start to go up instead of down unless an outside force affected it), and Newton’s First Law (which essentially is inertia), which states that an object in motion tends to stay in motion unless acted upon by an outside force, and an object at rest tends to stay at rest unless acted upon by an outside force. So, the bookshelf fell down until both the boy’s fallen body and the ground stopped the bookshelf from falling further.