What is the first law?

Newton's 1st Law of motion is that every object will remain at rest or in uniform motion unless acted on by an external force.

Hi Theresia!

The first law states that 'an object will stay at rest, or if it is moving, will stay moving in a straight line until it is acted on by an external force'

In other words an object will keep doing what it is doing until an outside force makes it do something else.

This law is the first law derived by Isaac Newton, who was an English physicist and mathematician.

So in easy terms Newton’s first laws says if you leave an object in the state it is then it will remain in the state forever until unless an external force is applied to it. So Basically it will either remain stationary or it will keep moving at a constant speed. Think of a pen if you leave a pen on a desk, the pen will remain like that forever until or unless something applies a force on it .

Newton's first law describes exactly what happens when an object is left to do its own thing - for example, if someone isn't pushing it across the floor. Strictly speaking, this means any time there is no force acting on an object. The best way to imagine Newton's laws is to think about what would happen if an object was in space (because then the added complication of Earth's gravity can be forgotten about). Newton's first law tells us that if no force is acting on an object, then its speed (or technically velocity) won't change - this includes the case where it is not moving at all, and so it will continue to not move. This can be hard to imagine sometimes if you were to picture something on Earth, because on Earth things like friction and air resistance will eventually slow things down. But in space, we can see that an object will just carry on moving forever and ever until something slows it down.

If there is no net force acting on the object, then the object will maintain a constant velocity.

An object will remain travelling with a constant velocity unless a resultant force acts on the object.

Object at rest or moving with constant velocity remains so unless a net/resultant external force acts

Newtons First law states that an object will remain stationary/at constant velocity, unless there is a resultant force.

Essentially Newtons first law states that an object will keep doing what it was already doing as long as no new force is applied to it.

So it if was moving East at 10m/s then it will keep moving East at 10m/s. It's velocity (speed and direction) remains the same.

If it wasn't moving at all (stationary) then it will remain stationary. Same as above - it's velocity (even though its not moving at all) remains the same.

Once a new force is introduced the resultant force (the force that tells you the direction and by how much) will no longer be zero, so the object will either change the speed or direction it's moving in or start to move if it was stationary.