World & Knowledge
Famous Scientific Laws
The rules of reality, in plain words
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Novice
World & Knowledge
The rules of reality, in plain words
Novice
Subdomain
Newton's laws and the everyday physics of forces, motion, and gravity. The first set of equations that ever made the world feel predictable.
Hooke's law
Within the elastic limit of a material, the force needed to stretch or compress a spring is directly proportional to the displacement from its rest position.
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Newton's third law
When one body exerts a force on a second body, the second body simultaneously exerts an equal and opposite force on the first.
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Newton's first law of motion
A body at rest stays at rest, and a body in uniform motion continues in a straight line, unless acted on by a net external force.
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Newton's second law, F = ma
The net force on an object equals the rate of change of its momentum, and for constant mass this reduces to force equals mass times acceleration.
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Conservation of momentum
In a closed system with no external forces, the total linear momentum stays constant in time.
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Force
Push or pull that changes motion.
Energy
Capacity to do work; conserved across transformations.
Entropy
Measure of disorder / number of microstates consistent with a macrostate.
Spacetime
The 4D fabric in which all events occur.
Electromagnetic wave
Self-propagating oscillation of electric and magnetic fields, including light.
Natural selection
Mechanism of adaptation via heritable variation + differential survival.
Conservation law
Statement that some quantity (energy, momentum, charge) is preserved across transformations.
Quantum
Discrete unit; the framework where particles behave probabilistically at small scales.
Power law
Relationship where one quantity varies as a power of another, producing heavy tails.
Bayes' theorem
Rule for updating probability of a hypothesis given new evidence.
Pareto principle
Roughly 80 percent of effects come from 20 percent of causes.