midnightpanther
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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 elevator. So, if people felt bad about their weight they could weigh themselves right when the grab on the ones going down which accelerates them downward so they would weigh less than they would when standing on the ground normally.
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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 her feet on the wooden floor, and because we rarely cut her nails so they are long and slow her down even more. Once she gets to the second part, she doesn't have enough room to get a running start and therefore she just sits there and barks until someone comes and gets her. I would advise her to come up the stairs and then round the corner but we could calculate the maximum speed she could round the corner based on the coefficient of friction between her and the ground and the fact that the floor is flat, but she's a dog, so...
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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 calculate the horizontal force needed to get it the right distance and they also need to know the force required to get the ball to the right spot and release it at a point where the angles will all be correct as well. Who knew these guys were so smart?
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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 perfect so that when he moves the chalk quickly it will skip like it does and make the dotted lines. It is essential that he goes fast so that the line stays straight and this is how he draws those famous lines.
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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 force on the head as the head applies to the fist, they should hypothetically speaking stay still if they just stood there and punched each other because they are both applying a force exactly same to each other and they are holding on to each other while they do it.
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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, the nail does not even come in contact with the wood, it just creates a hole in the wood with its electrons, and then hovers in the hole, because the electrons push each other apart with basically equal forces, making the nail levitate.
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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, I just allow the ball to hit my racket and because it is going fast enough that once it bounces off of my racket is still has enough momentum to go back to the other side of the net without me even having to swing, saving energy and making a good shot as well.
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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 becomes toasted. Then, after you toast it, you must apply the PB to the bread, so you get it on the knife, and then as you slide the knife across the toast, since the toast is rough the peanut butter gets pulled off because of its higher coefficient of friction causes the peanut butter to stick to the toast instead of your knife. You're welcome
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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 puck is in contact with the stick, the torque is acting on the puck and then the force of the stick, like a spring, is out of equilibrium and wants to return to it so the puck will then have even more force acting on it.
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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 can find a way in which this hypothetical momentum could be found. Perhaps, we could say that when doing something the team "gets big" as many people exclaim when someone does something good, and therefore will increase their mass and thus increase their momentum. Or, possibly in hockey when a team scores a goal, the players will feel more motivated and therefore they will start to move faster and with more energy, which will increase their velocity once again increasing the momentum as well. Go Sabres.
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Why doorknobs are far away from the hinges
midnightpanther posted a blog entry in Blog midnightpanther
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 multiplying force times distance, so the farther the force applied is from the pivot point, the higher the torque would be, so this is why it is most obvious to put doorknob as far away from the pivot point as possible. -
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 angular momentum. With the disc spinning one way, the angular momentum would be pushing down, making the disc go up, so this combination of things cause the flight of the frisbee.
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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 trick it just ends up spinning the whole roll and you wind up holding a 5 foot long stretch of TP in your hands. This happens because of inertia. In the beginning, it is hard to get the larger roll rotating and therefore you can apply more of a force without it spinning, and the force required to get the roll really spinning is less than the force that is required to rip the toilet paper. However, once the roll gets small enough it is easier to spin the roll and therefore the force needed to spin it becomes less than the force needed to rip the paper and this is why you end up just pulling a butt ton of toilet paper out of the roll instead of ripping it.
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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 top of the wing and higher on the bottom and because air likes to travel from high pressure to low pressure, the air then pushes the plane up and these forces can be adjusted based on speed and altitude and the angle of which the wing is turned, and all of these things combine to create a flyable plane. This picture explains it better than I do.
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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 hitting him would be very large because the mass is larger, however the rock was moving slower and its much harder to aim with a large rock. After this impressive display, it is Wallace's turn, and he cleverly picks up a small stone, and then quickly whips it at the big dudes head and he gets knocked out cold. The momentum and impulses of the of the rocks hitting the people would have probably been pretty similar to each other because although the mass of Wallace's rock was smaller, he had a greater velocity on it, doing just about the same damage to the big bloke. I guess that was all the physics that was really noticeable. But the Sabres won again!! Go Sabres:cold: