You have heard about the notions of position, velocity and acceleration used to describe the movement of a body; you have also heard about using forces. We will now introduce you to another magnitude that is used to relate the bodie's state of motion with the forces that act on it.

We all know that bodies have the capacity of exerting a force on other bodies that are in their way. We will call the magnitude that measures this capacity linear momentum.

We will now try to find out what this magnitude depends on.

In the next visual, a billiard ball collides with the edge of the table, were we have placed an apparatus to measure the maximum force that the ball exerts in the collision. In all cases, we will assume that the collision lasts for a tenth of a second.