Unit 5 cont.

In class today, we learned about free body diagrams. At first, they were really confusing to grasp and understand, but after doing a couple practice problems, I finally started to get it. It was hard to wrap my head around the concept that at any given time there are forces acting upon every object. For example, if you are just sitting still, you may think that you aren’t under any forces because you are not moving at all.  But even when you are just sitting in a chair, there are two forces acting upon you, yet they're balanced so you don’t move. There is normal force that is pulling you up because of the direct contact between you and the chair. Simultaneously, there is also weight force acting upon you, pulling you down with gravity. That's why it was hard for me to understand how one object could have 4 forces acting upon it at once. But going through today's lesson, I realize that even though an object may not be moving, that doesn’t mean that there are no forces involved – it just means that the forces are balanced and therefore aren’t apparent with movement.