There are really only three forces on this pencil: the gravitational force, the normal force of the table pushing up and a frictional force to prevent the tip from sliding. Quick quiz question – while the pencil is falling over, how does the normal force compare to the gravitational force? I’m not going to tell you the answer.
Ok, but how do you analyze the motion of this falling pencil? Honestly, it’s not so simple. Since this is a rigid object and not a point mass, we have to take into account both the forces and the torque on the pencil. However, since the pencil is constrained to just move in the θ direction, we can describe this with just one variable (θ).
If I take the pencil point to be the rotation point, I can write the angular momentum principle for the pencil. As a reminder, the angular momentum principle says