Law 2. The acceleration of an object is inversely proportional to its mass and directly proportional to the net force acting on it (Tipler, 1976).
Mathematically, Law 2 can be expressed as:
or, upon rearranging and isolating Fnet on the left-hand side, as:
where a = acceleration and m = the mass of the object upon which the force is acting. Physicists define mass as an intrinsic property of an object that is a measure of its resistance to acceleration while acceleration is simply the change in velocity over some change in time (i.e. a=Dv/Dt) (Tipler, 1976). Thus, force is that which changes, or tends to change, the state of rest or the state of motion of a body.