Inertia - Blog 3

Like probably everyone else in our class, I'm doing the table cloth dish trick.  Although I wanted to do it with my whole table, my mom was freaking out and would only let me do it with one plate and a table setting.  In the video the plate and fork move very little when I pull the table setting out from underneath them, this is because of the plate and fork's inertia, their resistance to change in velocity.  Since the plate was at rest at the beginning of the video, it will stay at rest unless acted upon by an outside force, this outside force is the setting.  When I pull the table setting out from under the plate it exerts a net force on the plate, but because I move it so fast this net force can only act on the plate for a fraction of a second, not providing enough time to move the plate very far.  If I had instead moved the plate very slowly, it would exert a small net force on the plate for a longer amount of time, thus pulling the plate along with it across the table. 

P.S. I realize that it wasn't very smart to pull the plate and film it by myself, so I apologize for the blurriness when the setting was actually pulled out from underneath, but I assure you, that the plate hardly moved at all!