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Example: Your weight

So how big is the force of gravity acting on you? Well how much do you weigh? The answers are the same! To see this step up onto a scale. Then we have the following diagram:

figure48

The red arrows indicate the forces acting on you. They are the force of gravity, and the force the scale exerts on you. The force the scale exerts on you is an example of a ``normal force''. The blue arrows indicate forces you exert on everything else. So at this point it is always a good idea to consider only the forces that act on one object at a time. So lets consider the red arrows first. We want the sum of these two forces to be zero because you are not accelerating. Therefore the force of gravity tex2html_wrap_inline627 plus the force of the scale on you tex2html_wrap_inline629 to be zero. This means they must have the same magnitude. So tex2html_wrap_inline631 . Now what about the force you exert on the scale, tex2html_wrap_inline633 ? By the third law, that has the same magnitude as tex2html_wrap_inline629 . So the scale registers a weight of mg.



Joshua Deutsch
Wed Jan 7 17:12:17 PST 1998