Ship Stopping Science: Exploring the Influence of Cargo Weight on Deceleration Speed

The reason why a ship carrying heavy cargo takes more time to come to a stop than an identical ship carrying lighter cargo, even when both are travelling at the same speed, is due to the fundamental physics concept known as inertia. Inertia is an object's resistance to change in its state of motion. When more mass - or weight, in this case - is added to a moving object, it increases the object's inertia and subsequently requires more force to change its state of motion (i.e., slowing down or stopping the ship). Hence, it will take a longer time to stop a ship carrying heavy cargo compared to a ship carrying a lighter cargo given the same amount of stopping force (often delivered in the form of reverse thrust from the ship's engines or by external forces like friction from the water). Another contributing factor is momentum. Momentum is the product of an object's mass and its velocity. A ship carrying heavy cargo has more momentum than one carrying lighter cargo if both are moving at the same speed, meaning it would require more force to halt its forward motion. So, the mass of the cargo significantly impacts how quickly the ship can be stopped.