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Today I am going to conduct an experiment that demonstrates Newton’s Second Law of
motion, which states that that the acceleration of an object depends on the mass of the object
and the amount of force applied, more commonly seen as Force=mass x acceleration.
I have used a leaf blower, a powerful force, and in the second instance I have used a less
powerful force, the back of a vacuum cleaner, which blows air out. I have three cars, of
differing masses.
I have set up the experiment on the floor of a large room. I have masking tape on the floor at intervals of a foot each. Remember,
we are looking for how much these objects accelerate, not how far they go.
In the first round, I will use the leaf blower, and start each of the cars at the zero mark.
Watch carefully how quickly the cars accelerate.
In this round, you saw that the car with the most mass accelerated the least, and the car
with the least mass accelerated the most. This demonstrates Newton’s Second Law of
Motion. Since the force is the same, we see that the acceleration decreases while the
mass increases.
In the next round, I will use the vacuum cleaner, which has a force less than that of the leaf
blower. You will see that the acceleration decreases while the mass increases, but the
acceleration in each case is less than with the leaf blower. This shows that a higher
force causes higher acceleration.