Imagine whirling a ball on a string over you head. suppose the knot holding the ball comes loose and the ball is instantly released from the string .what path dose the ball take after leaving the string? use newton's first law to explain your answer

Most people picture the ball sailing away in a straight line away
from the CENTER of the circular path.  It's as if there's a force
pulling it away from the center, and that's where the myth of
'Centrifugal force' comes from.

If you shoot a video of the event and view it in slow motion, you
see that after the string breaks, the ball does take off in a straight
line, but the straight line DOESN't come from the center of the spin.
It's a line that's TANGENT to the circle, at the exact point where the
ball was when the string broke.  In other words, it's a straight line
in the direction the ball was traveling when the force that was keeping
it on a circle disappeared.

That's exactly what Newton's first law is saying:  An object will travel
in a straight line at a constant speed if there's no force to make it
speed up, slow down, or pull it away from the straight line.

The string was doing that, until it let go.