Hooke's law

Hooke's law is a principle of physics that states that the force F needed to extend or compress a spring by some distance X is proportional to that distance. That is: F = kX, where k is a constant factor characteristic of the spring: its stiffness, and X is small compared to the total possible deformation of the spring. The law is named after 17th-century British physicist Robert Hooke. He first stated the law in 1660 as a Latin anagram. He published the solution of his anagram in 1678 as: ut tensio, sic vis ("as the extension, so the force" or "the extension is proportional to the force").

Hooke's equation holds (to some extent) in many other situations where an elastic body is deformed, such as wind blowing on a tall building, a musician plucking a string of a guitar, and the filling of a party balloon. An elastic body or material for which this equation can be assumed is said to be linear-elastic or Hookean.

Hooke's law is only a first-order linear approximation to the real response of springs and other elastic bodies to applied forces. It must eventually fail once the forces exceed some limit, since no material can be compressed beyond a certain minimum size, or stretched beyond a maximum size, without some permanent deformation or change of state. Many materials will noticeably deviate from Hooke's law well before those elastic limits are reached.