ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Work (physics)

Work in physics means when you use your energy to move something. Imagine you want to push a heavy book across a table. You use your muscles to push the book, and the book moves. This means you did work.

But wait, how do we know how much work you did? There is a special formula that scientists created to measure work. It's called work equals force times distance.

Force means how hard you push or pull something. The more force you use, the harder you are pushing or pulling. Distance means how far you are moving the thing you are pushing or pulling. So if you push a heavy book a short distance, you are doing less work than if you pushed it a long distance.

Let's use an example. Imagine you want to lift a toy car off the table and put it on a shelf. You use your hands to lift the car, and you move it one foot up to the shelf. The force you used to lift the toy car is how hard you had to use your hands to pick it up. Let's say you used two pounds of force. The distance you moved the toy car is one foot. So the work you did is two pounds of force times one foot of distance, which equals two foot-pounds of work.

In conclusion, work in physics is when you use your energy to move something. Scientists use a special formula to measure work, which is work equals force times distance. The more force you use and the farther you move something, the more work you do.