Question

I'm looking for a concise definition of motion / movement for my Masters of Fine Art, where I'm exploring the tension between immobility and movement, through painting. Wikipedia references the hyperphysics site, is there you could one recommend? The wikipedia definition is great for my purpose but is there one you could recommend I could reference?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_(physics) -

Answer 1

The simple definition of motion is that it is always relative.

All things are in motion. You may be perfectly still yet the earth is spinning on its axis and orbiting the sun. The sun orbits the center of the galaxy, our galaxy and Andromeda are moving toward one another, most of the other galaxies are moving away.

So to measure motion in a meaningful way, we measure it relative to the observer or another object we consider not to be moving. When you pass a car on the highway moving in the same direction, you may be going 70mph, and the other car 65mph. But your speed relative to the other car is 5mph. When the shuttle docks with the space station the two orbiting objects approach one another at a very slow speed relative to one another, but both are orbiting at 17,000mph relative to the surface of the earth.

The state of rest or motion is always relative. I would explain it to you from the following example:
A person sitting in the cabin of a moving train is at rest with respect to other people in the cabin but it is in motion with respect to a person standing on the platform. As he is changing his position with respect to the man standing at the platform. The state of rest and motion are always relative. If any body 'A' is at changing its position with respect to the body 'B', we will say that the body is in motion with respect to the body 'B'. But if there is a body 'C', and with respect to 'C', 'A' is at rest so thus it proves that 'A' is in motion with respect to 'B' but at rest with respect to 'C'.
So it proves that motion as well as rest are always relative.
Source(s):
My Physics book, as I am in 9th class.

Einstein quote:
"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed."
http://rescomp.stanford.edu/~cheshire/EinsteinQuotes.html

Answer 2

Brilliant, your explanation has really helped my understanding. Perhaps the motion interpreted in my painted works is relative to the experience of movement carried by the viewer, influenced by acceleration in society and other forms of movement in our modern moving world and the space in which it is presented. The motion inherent in the process of creating the works hopefully contributes to these connections.

An online reference for motion definition would be great if there's one handy anyone?...

Answer 3

Another clue :

Albert Einstein dubbed Galileo "the father of modern physics—indeed of modern science altogether."

Maybe a good understanding is found in the work of these guys ...
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/physics/galileo-sobel.html

Answer 4

MEASURING MOTION
Galileo probably gained his introduction to experimental technique while assisting his musician father, who conducted home experiments in the physics of sound. Galileo began his own experimental studies of motion while serving as a young mathematics professor at Pisa, where he is said to have dropped cannonballs from the Leaning Tower to demonstrate how objects of different weights fall with the same speed [see Falling Objects]. He continued his experiments during nearly two decades of teaching at the University of Padua, near Venice, where he measured the swinging of pendulums until he could describe their periods by a mathematical law, and he rolled bronze balls down inclined planes a thousand ways to derive the rate of acceleration in free fall.
Through such pursuits, Galileo discovered and described phenomena that generations of philosophers had not even noticed. For example, the shape of the path traced through space by a hurled or fired missile, Galileo showed, was not just "a line somehow curved," as his predecessors had said, but always precisely a parabola. And when lemons dropped from treetops, or cannonballs from towers, each one picked up speed in the same characteristic pattern, tied to the elapsed time of its fall: Whatever distance the object covered in one instant—measured as a pulse beat, a sung note, the weight of water that dripped from Galileo's timing device—by the end of two such instants it would travel four times as far. After three instants, it wound up at nine times the initial distance of descent; after four instants, 16 distance units—and so on, always accelerating, always covering a distance determined by the square of the time passed [see Inclined Plane].
Posterity agrees that Galileo's great genius lay in his ability to observe the world at hand
Galileo uncovered this fundamental relationship between distance and time without so much as a reliable unit of measure or an accurate clock. Italy possessed no national standards in the 17th century, leaving distances open to guesstimate gauged by flea's eyes, hairbreadths, lentil or millet seed diameters, hand spans, arm lengths, and the like. Galileo perforce delineated his own arbitrary units along the length of his experimental apparatus. As long as these units matched one another, he reasoned, he could use them to discern mathematical relationships. Lacking any kind of precision timekeeper, Galileo literally weighed the moments of his experiments: He allowed water to drip through a narrow pipe during the interval of interest; then he balanced the collected water's weight against grains of sand.
"...A LARGE AND EXCELLENT SCIENCE"
Aristotelian philosophers of Galileo's day railed at such a mathematical approach to physics, on the grounds that mathematicians pondered immaterial concepts, while Nature consisted entirely of matter. They looked down on mathematicians and denigrated the study of mathematics as inferior—even irrelevant—to natural philosophy. Nature, in their view, could not be expected to follow precise numerical rules.
But Galileo correctly envisioned the experimental, mathematical analysis of Nature as the wave of the future: "There will be opened a gateway and a road to a large and excellent science," he predicted, "into which minds more piercing than mine shall penetrate to recesses still deeper." Among the first to bear out this prophecy was Sir Isaac Newton, born within a year of Galileo's death, who codified mathematical laws of motion and universal gravitation.
Posterity agrees that Galileo's great genius lay in his ability to observe the world at hand, to understand the behavior of its parts, and to describe these in terms of mathematical proportions. For these achievements, Albert Einstein dubbed Galileo "the father of modern physics—indeed of modern science altogether."

source :
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/physics/galileo-sobel.html

Answer 5

Another thought about motion is the absolute zero. The temperature absolute zero - the temperature when molecular motion ceases