Everyday at school we have to climb all of those stairs to get to the upper levels of the school and I get exhausted from it, and so I came up with a brilliant solution that no one really thinks is a good idea. You just get rid of the stairs and we have ladders, and some of them can just sit still and other ones can be like moving up or down so you just grab on and you are changing floors. The physics here is that right when you grab on, you accelerate either up or down, like when you are on an
For all of you who don't know, my dog's name is Daisy and she is a schnoodle, not that that relates to this post at all. The point is that she has trouble with our stairs, because they go up, then there is a platform, they then turn left and there are two more stairs that lead to the most of the bedrooms. The problems she has is that when she is at the bottom she can get a running start and then make her way up the first set of stairs, but then she loses all this momentum due to the friction of
After realizing that there was nothing to watch but college basketball for about a month long stretch of time, I eventually gave in and started watching the games and I found out that all the players must be masters of physics. I found it amazing that they could always throw a ball from like 20 feet away into a hole that is 10 feet in the air and is just a little bit larger than the ball. They need to throw the ball with enough arc that it can fall through the hoop easily but then they must also
As everyone in the world of physics knows, Walter Lewin has the ability to draw dotted lines with perfection. They are perfectly straight and spaced out, and he can draw them in mere seconds. To do this, as a master of physics he can figure out how to do it with ease and teach his students some extra physics as well. To draw his lines, he must have calculated the kinetic friction of the chalk on the chalkboard, and then held the chalk at a certain angle so that the sin and cos forces will be per
Because this year the Buffalo Sabres picked up two new players who are built for wrecking people and getting in fights, I have learned a lot about fights and how they work. When hockey players get into a fight on the ice as they often do, there is a lot of physics involved. What usually happens when 2 players get in a fight, they grab each others jerseys with one arm and punch at each other with the other hand, and because when one person punches the other and the fist applies the same amount of
My Dad has been doing a lot of work in our house and doing construction in our downstairs bathroom, and from observing him while he works instead of helping, and I have learned physics from the work that he does. As we all know, objects never really come in contact with each other, the magnetic forces of one objects electrons just push against the magnetic force of the other objects electrons, and since they are both negative, they push each other apart. When you hammer a nail into wood then, th
This year, on the tennis team, I found that one area in which I performed relatively well was in my groundstrokes, all because of the physics that I know and how I apply it every time that I hit the ball from the baseline. When the ball is coming towards me with a certain momentum, I account for the speed that it is coming with, and based on the velocity I decide how hard I need to swing in order to return the ball. For example, when I am returning a serve that is very fast, I don't swing at all
Many times throughout my life I have had a desire for peanut butter, but with a crunch, and with something that would help to get the peanut butter off of my teeth while I am eating it, and the solution proved to be peanut butter toast. This delicious treat is not only filling and full of protein, there is physics involved in the making of it as well. First off is the toasting of the bread, in which the toaster heats up and radiates heat, and the bread, being cooler takes in some of the heat and
The hockey stick is a type of lever that allows players to get the maximum amount of force onto the puck and thus shoot it with the maximum velocity. They use torque, and knowing that with increased length, the torque is increased, a longer stick is usually better than a shorter one because it will have a greater velocity on the end where the puck is being pushed. Often, when a player takes a slap shot, they hit the ice with their stick first, and this bends the stick slightly so that once the p
In the NHL and in many different sports, many players, coaches, and broadcasters often talk about the momentum of a team after they do something good, and thus are expected to have some new found abilities to do better than they had before. This hypothetical momentum is shown often in hockey when one team does something such as scoring a goal, killing off a penalty, or winning a fight. However, the formula for momentum in physics is that momentum is equal to mass times velocity, so perhaps we ca
This is something that I learned about last year in my principals of engineering class in which we discussed different lever types and the door was an example of one of them, I'm not sure which. But regardless, I've seen many movies of foreign places in which they put the doorknobs in the middle of the doors and this seems pretty dumb to me. When looking at the door, we can call the hinges the pivot point, and then say that the net torque is equal to mass times acceleration. Torque, is solved by
Unfortunately, the physics of a frisbee is very similar to the blog I did about the physics of an airplane, with the larger distance for the air to go on the top of the frisbee and the lesser distance on bottom so the change in pressure causes a rise to the frisbee and then the horizontal force you apply to the frisbee moves it this way while the pressure keeps it in the air.
However, there is another thing that I think applies to the frisbee that does not affect an airplane, and that is the a
I'm starting to run low on ideas for these physics blogs and clearly I'm getting pretty desperate because I'm starting to write about pretty dumb things like toilet paper, but that's just the way its going to have to be. So here we go. When you have a new roll of toilet paper ready for use, you may do what I do, which is get out a stretch of the stuff then pull it quickly and usually the paper rips right there. However, as you use more, the roll gets smaller and occasionally when you try this tr
For a long time, the way that airplanes worked was confusing and I had no idea how those giant bulky metal tubes were able to stay in the sky, but I recently found out how they actually fly. The creators of the wings make it so that the top of the wing is more rounded while the bottom is relatively straight, so the air that must go over the top must move faster than the air on the bottom must. And, when the air is moving faster, the pressure there must be lower, then the pressure is lower on the
My father and I are currently watching Braveheart and there were many parts I noticed that had physics in it. The first part I noticed this was when William Wallace gets into a challenge with some big dude and they decide to peacefully resolve the conflict by throwing rocks at each other. First, the big dude throws a huge rock at Wallace, thinking that bigger is better and I agree that had he hit Wallace with the rock, he would be in serious trouble because the momentum and impulse of the rock h
Well my mother and I recently decided to take down our Christmas lights that we hung along the roof line of the front of our house this year, and the original plan was to set up the ladder and unhook a few, then move the ladder over and do it again, but this seemed to be taking a unneccessarily long time. So, using my physics knowledge I told her just take one off, and then drop it and the force of it falling down would hopefully be enough to pull down the next one and then instead of painstakin
Yesterday I was watching the Worlds Strongest Men Competition on ESPN and they were doing an event where they had a bus tied to them and then they had to pull it a certain distance by pulling on a rope that was in front of them and walking with it. There was a lot of physics involved, and it was quite a sight to see. First of all, I noticed that the hardest part was to get the bus to start moving whether it was because of the static friction being more then the kinetic friction or something to d
The other day my cousin did the 500m in a swim meet he had and he came in third place and I thought about that and found out that this would mean doing 20 laps in the high school pool and I wondered what kind of physics was involved and the work he did to complete this race. To simplify this problem I am only going to think about the horizontal component of his swimming because otherwise it would be a lot more complex and I would like to think that his buoyant force might almost even out with gr
Due to the fact that the recent weather has been so blustery and cold, we have been using our fireplace insert things basically nonstop for the past few days and from looking at the upcoming weather we will most likely be using it for a few more. But once again, the physics of this fireplace was simply too exciting to ignore, so here we go. My fireplace has a heat box, which is where all the wood and fire goes, and once the fire gets hot and metal is heated up, this box radiates a lot of heat, a
The Sabres first game of the 2013 NHL season took place yesterday and I would like to take a minute to describe the physics involved in the very first goal. The Sabres were in the Philadelphia zone and the Ott, the newest player on the team was left alone about 25 feet away from the goal. The puck came towards him, away from the goal and he took a one time slapshot to beat the Flyer's goalie. The physics here is pretty obvious. If we say that going towards the goal is the positive direction, the
So far this year in physics it hasn't been as bad as I had originally expected because of all the horror stories I heard from all the other physics C students. Although I am expecting this year to get much harder, I felt that this quarter was definatly managable and I hope to continue on this path. We learned about impusle and momentum and kinematics and the newtons laws and most of these things we learned the basics of last year, so it hasn't been too difficult. Although the thing I found to be
As some of you may have previously read, a certain DavidStack said something about embarassing one of his friend in the game of ping pong, however I believe that he mislead you. There is no way that he could have beat me, in actuality, the game was a tie because neither of us could score a point on our own serves, so the score just would go back and forth by one, and you must win by two. But how you may ask, is it that neither of us could score on our own serve? Well the answer is physics. For t
While asking my dad about the physics of cars, he happened to bring up the impressive physics involved in doing a wheelie. After going to many drag races with my dad I've seen many cars do wheelies, but I never really thought how it happened until now. If you don't know a wheelie is when a car or motorcycle is riding on only its back wheel(s) for a short period of time. As shown in this picture when a strong force is applied to the back of the vehicle, by the force of the tire pushing against t
Recently I was thinking about how I wanted a car and then I got to thinking about how a car really works and seeing as my dad is a car fanatic, he had taught me but it had never really occured to me as to the physics involved. The pistons in the engine are attatched to a crank shaft which is eventually attatched to the axle and it spins the wheels. But, to make the pistons in the cylinders move, physics is needed. First, the piston is closed almost all the way, and then a small amount of gas is
I have found that physics is prevalent in football in many different ways, from the projectile motion of the throws and kicks to the forces of momentum in the tackles. When the quarterback throws the ball, if follows an arch where the ball is going up, comes to a stop in the vertical direction, and then starts coming back down, and hopefully falls into the hands of another player. For this to happen the quarterback must take into account the angle at which he releases the football because the hi
