Euler's laws of motion Euler's laws of motion In classical mechanics, Euler's laws of motion are equations of motion which extend Newton's laws of motion for point particle to rigid body motion. They were formulated by Leonhard Euler about 50 years after Isaac Newton formulated his laws. Euler's first law states that the linear momentum of a body, (also denoted ) is equal to the product of the mass of the body and the velocity of its center of mass : Internal forces between the particles that make up a body do not contribute to changing the total momentum of the body as there
Newton's laws of motion way one can consider the laws to be a definition of these quantities. Newtonian mechanics has been superseded by special relativity, but it is still useful as an approximation when the speeds involved are much slower than the speed of light. The first law states that if the net force (the vector sum of all forces acting on an object) is zero, then the velocity of the object is constant. Velocity is a vector quantity which expresses both the object's speed and the direction of its motion; therefore, the statement that the object's velocity is constant is a statement that