The Physics of a Concert
Entry posted by ClarkK
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Last night I was at an awesome concert, but as I looked around, I realized how much physics can truly relate to everything going on around me.
First of all, if you are at a concert, you expect to hear some music. That must mean that sound waves have to be traveling through the air for everyone to hear it. As I was sitting there enjoying the concert, I realized that the speed of sound in air at STP is 3.31x10^2 m/s! This made me extremely happy to have some background information on sound waves that most people don't have because they didn't take regents physics. I also knew that the closer I got to the stage, the higher the frequency and amplitude would be, and if I started heading towards the door, the amplitude and frequency would decrease, which illustrates the Doppler Effect.
Also, there were some pretty awesome lights shining all over the stage and occasionally over the crowd. I was watching the colorful lights, when all of a sudden the electromagnetic spectrum came to mind. I thought about how out of the whole spectrum, there is only a small part that is made up of visible light. I also thought how all the colors can come together and if they are reflected, that creates white, and if they are absorbed, that creates black. I also realized how fast light must be traveling, at a speed of 3.00x10^8 m/s! This information gave the concert a whole new meaning.
As I was looking around at the crowd, I noticed that a lot of people seemed to be crowd surfing, but many of them fell to the ground, which looked pretty painful. I then wondered what their final velocity would be when they hit the ground, so I decided to use one of my kinematics equations to figure it out. First of all, a person's initial velocity would be 0 m/s, because they are just lying on top of the crowd right before they fall. They would probably fall a distance of 2.5 meters, and their acceleration would be 9.81 m/s^2. I then could use the equation vf^2=vi^2+2ad, and once I plugged in all of my known values, I figured out that their final velocity would be about 7 m/s.
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