Newton’s Laws of Motion

A photo from the 1940s.  Holy cats.  This doesn’t show a marvelous command of Newton’s Laws of Motion, does it?  300 years later, some of us seem to have a tough time predicting what will happen to that baby in the case of a sudden stop.

From Britannica, on Newton’s first law, the law of inertia:

Newton’s first law states that if a body is at rest or moving at a constant speed in a straight line, it will remain at rest or keep moving in a straight line at constant speed unless it is acted upon by a force. In fact, in classical Newtonian mechanics, there is no important distinction between rest and uniform motion in a straight line; they may be regarded as the same state of motion seen by different observers, one moving at the same velocity as the particle and the other moving at constant velocity with respect to the particle. This postulate is known as the law of inertia.