how many pouds in a newton?

Answer 1

Technically, there could ten pounds in a Newton, or next to none -- it all depends on the gravitational acceleration of where you're measuring.

This is because the pound is technically a unit of weight, not mass, and thus is a conditional unit of measure. However, in everyday usage, a pound is treated as a unit of mass (we'll explored later why this is technically mistaken).

This isn't nitpicking: there's a fundamental difference between "mass" and "weight". Mass is how much stuff you have. Weight is how much force that stuff applies. Newton related these two factors using his Second Law of Motion, succinctly described as:

F=ma

...where 'F' is the resulting force or 'weight' (measured in newtons), 'm' is the mass of the object (measured in kilograms), and 'a' is the gravitational acceleration acting upon that object. A newton and a pound are both units of weight, but because of their direct relation with metric units, newtons are easier to work with (don't worry, we'll convert to pounds later).

Assuming that your teacher hasn't given you a trick question though, we can assume that the gravitational acceleration is that of Earth, which is 9.8 m/s^2. So now the equation looks like this:

F=m*9.8

Since we're looking for the mass that would produce 1N or one newton, we can now set F equal to 1:

1=m*9.8

Now we just do a simply division of 9.8 to isolate 'm' by itself:

m= 1/9.8
m= 0.1

Thus, it takes approximately 0.1 kg to produce 1N of force. To convert kilograms to pounds, we multiply by the conversion factor of 2.2:

m (in pounds) = 0.1kg x 2.2
m= 0.225 lbs.


Again, we're treating the pound unit in its everyday usage as measure of mass, though technically this shouldn't be so. Why? Remember, *F* (force or 'weight') changes according to *a* (gravitational acceleration) -- so if you were on the moon, where gravity is weaker, you would "weigh" less -- even though you're mass is still the same! In short, you can use the pound to measure mass or weight -- so long as you are on Earth. Feel free to challenge your physics teacher on this -- he'll either be impressed or dumbfounded, and either way you can feel pretty smart!

Answer 2

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how many pouds in a newton?

Answer 3

1 N = 0.22481 pounds