Dropping Kirby

Today, I asked my sister Jodie to help me with physics. In this picture above, she's holding a stuffed Kirby (for those of you who do not know who Kirby is, It's a pink Nintendo hero that copies his opponent's foes special abilities, but that's irrelevant to physics).

While Kirby is being held in the air, it has inertia (since all objects have inertia). Inertia is the resistance of changing in its state of motion. For example, if an object is at rest, it stays at rest. On the other hand, if the object is in motion, it wants to stay in motion. Kirby is at rest, and it's acceleration is 0 meters per second squared. Also, Kirby's velocity is 0 meters per second.

Anyways, if Jodie were to drop Kirby, then Kirby would start to accelerate toward the ground because of gravity (which is -9.8 meters per second). Depending on how high my sister is, the velocity, when Kirby finally hits the ground, would be greater than 0 meters per second because of gravity. For example, if it takes two seconds for Kirby to fall to the ground, Kirby's final velocity, if you ignored air resistance, would be -19.6 meters per second (negative because it's moving downward motion).

In Physics, mass is known as the property of an object that determines how much it will resist a change in velocity. Kirby does not have much mass, so therefore Kirby will have more inertia than a larger, more massive object like an elephant. Because Kirby has such little mass, too, air resistance doesn't apply to it so much.

This is it for the Physics epiphanies today. ☺ I hoped you enjoyed Kirby and my little sister.