Mechanics

Mechanics, for this level, represents the lion's share of material. Mechanics can be further catagorized into "Kinematics" and "Newton's Laws." Each of these topics can, in turn, be broken down to consider motion in a Linear or Circular fashion.

We start with kinematics which analyzes motion without really considering why things move. The idea is to be able to predict where things came from and where they will go given set of existing measurements.

This is the meat of the matter. Forces are the origin of all forms of transformation in both classical and modern physics. In mechanics this manifests itself as a change in the state of motion. This is the essense of Newton's discovery. Except for really wierd circumstances in non-euclidian space, a force will give rise to an acceleration and accelerations must have invoved a force.

Motion in a circle is just a special case where the speed of an object can be constant but still have acceleration due to the constantly changing direction. In this circumstance Newton's second law takes a special form.

Forces that are position dependant can give rise to some interesting types of motion. The simplest form of these forces is one that varies linearly with displacement from some starting position. If the force opposes the displacement then the motion will be a type we call "Harmonic."