Introduction to Force, Types, Forms and Equations

 A force can be defined as anything that changes a body from state of rest or uniform motion in a straight line. As defined by the law of inertia by Sir Isaac Newton, a body will continue to be in its state of rest or uniform motion in a straight line, unless acted upon by an external force. Therefore from the Newston’s 1^st law of motion we can we can say that a force is anything that changes the position of an object. Anything that causes displacement is a force.

the SI unit for force id newton, kgm/s² , force is a vector quantity, it has both magnitude and direction.

 There are several types and form of forces depending on where they exist, but basically there are two categories of force, namely contact and non-contact force.

 The contact force are those force that involve push or pull, there must be a physical contact between the two bodies or object involved. For example pushing, pulling etc. While non-contact forces there is no any physical contact between the two bodies involved ,but still the force exist, in other word non-contact forces are called static or stationery forces or field forces. Example of non-contact forces are electrostatic forces, magnetic field forces, gravitational forces etc.

force in physics can be in different form depending on the medium or condition it found itself,  a force in between charged bodies is called electrostatic force, which  can be either electrostatic force of attraction or repulsion for like and unlike charges respectively, a force in a magnetic field is a magnetic force, which can be attractive or repulsive depending on the polarity of the magnetic object, like poles (e.g north and north pole or south and south pole) will yield a repulsive force while unlike pole (e.g north and south pole) will yield an attractive force.

in the nucleus of an atom , where we have the nucleons we have the nuclear force, this force is neither electrostatic or magnetic, it is what bind the protons and the neutrons to form the nucleus , hence the name nuclear force. The force of attraction between the electrons and the nucleus is an electrostatic force, note that the electros are negatively charged while the nucleus are positively charged.

the nuclear force are of two types the strong and the weak interaction, the strong interaction are being mediated by the exchange of pi-mesons, they are short range forces , only exist with x10^-15m .

Between object of different masses we have the gravitational force, or simply gravity, this is the force that attract a mass or pull ay a mass from the centre of the earth. This force is force is proportional to the product of the masses of the object involved and opposite to the distance separating the object, according to the Newston’s law of universal gravitation, stated as follows, the force of attraction between two masses M1 and M2 is directly proportional to the product of the masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance r separating them. the carriers or mediators (quanta of  the interaction) of this gravitational forces are called gravitons.

 the general formula for force is f = ma, where m is the mass of the object and a is the acceleration,

the acceleraton is the chance of velocity per unit time given by a =v/t.

in electrostatic field  the force is give by the coulomb’s law, which stated the force of attraction between two charges Q1 and Q2 is directly proportional to the product of their charges and inversely proportional to the square of the  distance r separating them.

given as F = KQ₁Q₂/r²

where k is is equal 1/4πℇ_o

in gravitational forces the force is given by  F =[GM₁M₂]/r² where M1 and M2 are the respective mass of the two bodies and r is their separation and G is  the universal gravitational constant.