![]() So you can make tubes, that would be better, but making round shapes is expensive and they are still pretty big. If you're building a skyscraper, you want your steel beams to resist bending, right? So how do you shape them? Do you just make big steel cylinders? That's not great because you're making bowling-ball type shapes, all the weight is concentrated close to the center, you want to make a basketball type shape, put the weight far from the center. Here's one final parallel that might help. So "Moment of Inertia" means an objects resistance to spinning. In science speak, "Moment" refers to twisting and spinning forces and "inertia" means resistance to motion. ![]() Similarly, a concentration of mass far from the center of the ball has a bigger effect than mass that's closer to the ball. A small person can balance a big person if the small person is far from the pivot and the big person is right up on it. Making a see-saw balance isn't just based on the weight of the people, but how far they are from the pivot. the bowling ball that has it's weight evenly distributed.Ī visualization for "why" might be imagine a see-saw. Since the basketball has all of it's weight concentrated far from the center, it's harder to spin vs. What we're getting at here is that making the balls spin faster isn't only about the where the center of weight is (it's the same for both balls), nor how much the balls weigh (it's the same for both balls) BUT you need to include some information about how the weight of the ball is distributed from the center. BUT a bowling is full up of heavy stuff but a basketball is more like heavy, thin outer shell filled with air. Both balls have the same "center" of weight (I'm saying weight not mass because this is ELI5), which is just the center of the ball. Imagine a basketball and a bowling ball, the same size and the same weight. Higher inertia means harder to accelerate.īut that's straight-line motion, what about spinning motion? Here's where "Moment of Inertia" comes into play. We would say that the train has "a higher inertia" than the car does. If you imagine a car, and a train in front of you, and you want to push them to get them both rolling up to 5 miles an hour, you can imagine it's easier to do this with the car, than the train. Inertia is the resistance to a change in motion.
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