Theory
According to Isaac Newton in his second law he stated when a pull or a push acts on a given object the object will accelerate in the same direction as to where the force is coming from. He expressed relationship using the following formula;
∑F=ma
In the equation above, ∑F will stand for the sum of the forces acting on the object, a standing for acceleration of the object while m, represents the mass of the object. From the equation, both the force and acceleration denote vector quantities. To use the equation above to calculate acceleration it is very important to consider all the forces acting on the object.
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"Newton’s Second Law Lab".
Error analysis
When the results are graphically represented it becomes very clear that there are some sources of errors that could have in some way affected the acceleration of the object. Air resistance and friction is the first form of the sources of errors. Both air resistance and friction present some small forces that offer resistance to motion. For instance, in our experiment, they will both be acting opposite to the net force.
The other source of error is the mass of the string. It is obvious that the string will add to the net force acting on the system. The string and the paper clips has some amount of mass and will affect the motion of the system. Therefore, when these variable forces are ignored, they will lead to errors in the results. To reduce the friction, the pulleys need to be checked and adjusted to reduce friction as much as possible.
Expansion questions
The tension of the string is not always equal to the mass of the object because when a given force it elongates pulls a string, it will be under stretch. From the experiment, we also found out that the tension of the string when the cart is at rest is greater compared to when the cart is in motion.
