Newton's 3 Laws of Motion Experiment

Newton's 3 Laws of Motion Lab Report

In this lab I am going to conduct experiments to prove Newton's three laws of motion were correct. The first law states that an object at rest will stay at rest until acted upon by another force and an object in motion will stay in motion until acted upon by another force. The second law states that acceleration is produced when a force acts on a mass. The greater the mass (of the object being accelerated) the greater the amount of force needed (to accelerate the object). Newton's third laws states that for every action there is an equal but opposite reaction.

The materials I used were two identical hot wheels cars, five books, a ramp made with a game board, two different sized play dough dummies. I also weighed the cars and the dummies using a kitchen scale. I measured the height and length of my ramp with a ruler and I timed my experiment with my stop watch on my phone.

In the first experiment I got the hot wheels car, then the play dough dummy, and five books to set up a ramp. Next I set up the dummy on the car then release the car down the ramp. I measured the height of the ramp, the length of the ramp, and the time it took for the car to travel down the ramp and then how far the dummy flew. In the 2nd experiment I made two dummies, weighed them and then set them down the ramp. Again recording the distance each dummy flew. In the third experiment I rolled two identical hot wheels cars toward each other with the same amount of force and watched them crash. . I weighed both cars and they weighed 10 grams. I marked a spot on the floor and measured 30 centimeter in opposite directions. I pushed one car my brother pushed the other car and we timed them so that they both ended up in the middle at the exact same time.

I predicted in the first experiment that on impact the dummy will fly. The experiment showed that on impact the dummy flew a few inches because the body of the dummy was still traveling at the same speed as the car was before the impact this is explained in Newton's first law of motion. "An object in motion tends to stay in motion and one at rest tends to stay at rest unless acted upon by another force". The dummy itself didn't hit the book/wall but the car did. Therefore the car stopped but the dummy kept going.

The ramp was 15 centimeters high and 51 centimeters