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Why Physics
Hotdog was right when she said that physics was completely nuts on the first day of physics. Physics can become overwhelming at anytime during your learning career in less than two seconds. Physics is a fine art and is shaped in many different ways. The cool thing about Physics is that it's used for practically everything; this is why physics is necessary for life! The first thing I would like to talk about are the VIR Tables. I really like VIR tables because once you get the hang of it you can calculate how much energy is running through your entire house. Another thing that is pretty interesting is that there are three different kinds of circuits, series, parallel, and mixed. All that can really help you get through this course is paying attention and asking questions. It also might help if you ask your teacher for more problems for practice. This shows dedication which is key in learning! Happy Studying!
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Spontaneous Combustion
Ok, so everybody has obviously heard of spontaneous Combustion but doesn't know what it really is, atleast I didn't before this. For spontaneous combustion to work there has to be a Pyrophoric substance. A Pyrophoric substance is something that reacts to strong oxidizers such as oxygen or water. Anyway the Pyrophoric substances have very low ignition points which are ignited by contained heat in the pile or where ever it is. Examples of a Pyrophoric substance are sodium, haypiles or compost. The biggest cause of the creation of heat for the ignition of the substance is from bacterial decomposition, where the bacteria break down something and by doing so release heat that is trapped and therefore builds up the heat in say the pile of compost which eventually ignites the pile of compost also know as spontaneous combustion. For a really big bang the most volitile Pyrophoric substance are Rieke metals which actually explode when contacted by Air.:tyrannosaurus: and dinosaurs are cool hence the t-rex
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Space
space is very interesting mainly because of how different it is compared to earth which makes since but what's very interesting is how some waves are able to pass through the reaches of space while other waves are not able to like light waves are able to go from the sun to us with no problem but sound waves it is impossible for the waves to go through space and that is because in the world there are mechanical waves like sound would be one and that means they need a medium to travel through to carry the energy like on earth they would be air generally but in space there is no medium for it to travel through however something like light is an electromagnetic wave which means it can travel even if it doesn't have a medium this is why we are able to get light from the sun.
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The physics of not moving.
Here's a tricky one, how is there physics involved in not moving?!?!?!??!?! Impossible you say? Neigh! Gravity. The only reason it's possible to not move or be constantly accelerating is because of the downward force of gravity, caused by the rotational inertia of the earth, so as long as the earth keeps spinning, you can keep doing nothing. Pretty Sweet, right?
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eating a donut
Although it may not seem like much, there are a lot of physics involved with eating a donut. First, you have to apply a force on the donut when you pick it up and raise it to your mouth. Since the average donut weighs in at about .04 kg, it takes about .4 newtons to lift a donut. it also takes roughly .4 Joules to lift a donut from the table to your head. lastly, if you bite really hard into the donut, you will exert anywhere from 500-700 newtons. that means the donut bites back with the same amount of force. So next time somebody makes fun of you for eating a donut, just tell them how much work it takes.
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Beginning Physics
When I started physics this semester, I was confused to say the least. It wasn't abnormal for me to go home and cry after school over my physics textbook; I was stressed just like the majority of students in my introductory class. Over the course of the past few months, however, it amazes me to see how far my understanding has come. Problem solving has become less daunting, and my self confidence has skyrocketed as my test grades improve. I look forward to exploring the world of physics even more as my mind continues to grow.
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No Physics in The Hobbit
I just wrote an entire blog entry and it deleted randomly............ oops....... anger.........
Anyway! Let's talk about the new Hobbit movies. J.R.R. Tolkien wrote the book as an entertaining action book for his kids. Peter Jackson - whose adaptation of the Lord of the Rings was already controversial - took this thin children's book of between 300 and 400 pages and turned it into a trilogy spanning about 9 hours of new characters, added scenes, invented drama, and life-or-death situations that had not been in the book. The movie is a great action film; it is a bad Middle Earth film. And it is a horror movie for physics enthusiasts. Take a look at the scene in which Gandalf and the dwarves - 10 points to Gryffindor if you can name them all without looking them up! - escape from the mountain of the Goblin King. Gandalf is a powerful wizard, yes. However, his mere presence would not have been able to account for all the impossible things that happened in that scene. The already highly implausible rope and wood bridges and ladders and platforms are questionable. Then take all the dwarves and Gandalf - a combined weight that I do not even want to add up - and put them on one platform. And then throw this raft down the side of a cavern. Every single person stays on the platform for the entire ride down. They land in a heap with groans and sassy remarks. If there had been even a hint of realism in this scene, then every single dwarf would had lost his life. And if Gandalf has not lost his, too, he would not have been able to walk away very soon. And right after that scene, we witness quite an impressive feat. Dwarves are made for mines, and as Gimli so enlightened us to in the original trilogy, they are natural sprinters. I did not know that they could fling themselves up into tall pines so quickly, though! Apparently the call of a Warg gives these heavy humanoids supernatural climbing and jumping abilities.
I like Peter Jackson, don't get me wrong. And fun fact, his birthday was on October 31! It is just that he took a children's book and made a 9 hour trilogy full of life-or-death that was not in the writing! And he also decided that he is cool enough to neglect physics. I understand that Middle Earth is different from our Earth, but I like to think that some of the same physics apply. I suppose that is something only J.R.R. Tolkien could have answered.
Until next time.
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Anti-Gravity
Most of the forces currently known to man have their opposites. Magnetism for example will have a North Pole acting opposite to that of a South Pole. For this reason I began to think of a possible opposite to the force of gravity. Although gravity is not very well understood today, it is widely accepted that mass causes gravity and creates the force that pulls two objects together. This type of force is often modeled as a large mass creating a dip in the fabric of space-time causing other objects to slide in towards it. This can be seen as such:
http://www.ws5.com/spacetime/162571main_GPB_circling_earth3_516.jpg
Keeping these principles in mind I began to think about what sorts of affects antimatter might cause. For example, could antimatter, containing the property opposite to that of mass, have opposite affects on the fabric of space-time, acting as a suction from above creating a hill, pushing other clumps of antimatter away from it. Upon research on the subject I found that antimatter is, contrary to my predictions, often believed to have an attracting force similar to gravity acting between itself and both matter and other antimatter.
Instead, an alternative proposal for an antimatter is known as dark energy. This mysterious force described in the links below has a repelling affect opposite to the attraction created by gravity. This force, strange as it may seem, is actually believed to strengthen as distance between objects increases due to the fact that the farther apart galaxies become, the faster they accelerate away from each other. Although not yet confirmed, this new force seems like it would have little application to the types of anti-gravity we would like to see here on earth for it seems to only have a noticeable affect at great distances. Sorry, no flying hover boards yet...
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/astronomy/cosmic_darknrg_020115-1.html
http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2004/12/text/
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physics on me
when I walk gravity is always acting on me. all day long physics is acting on my body. when you fall you experience this because you are always being tied to the earth by gravity. when you jump in the air your being effected by gravity because you don't just keep going up into space. gravity is constantly bringing you back down to earth. also when you are falling you are constantly falling at a rate of 9.81 m/s2 down once you reach terminal velocity however you can no longer accelerate. however you will most likely not survive the fall at this point.
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Getting the most out of studying
Dr. Chew was very helpful in giving me strategies for studying. I have turned in my questions to the videos on a separate sheet of paper in class.
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Foul ball physics
Recently in an MLB game a fan was struck by a foul ball. This person was severely injured from the baseball. My initial question was why didn't this person just move out of the way. Well, easier said than done. An official league baseball has a mass of .145 kg, and the average velocity of a major league fastball is 40.3 m/s. this means that when the ball hits the bat, if the batter perfectly squares up the baseball, the ball can leave the bat at approximately 49 m/s which is equivalent to 110 mph. The individual that was hit by the ball was on the third base side, first row. This means that there was a distance of 50 meters between the batter and the person hit. The time it took for the ball to reach the fan was 0.92 seconds. Would you be able to react that fast?
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Batting Cages
I remember being brought to the batting cages a couple times over the summer when I was younger. Not being interested in baseball at all, and still not being that interested, it was still a fun experience. In a batting cage, it's yourself, a bat, and this machine which shoots baseballs. The entire purpose is for you to try and hit the baseball, and there's net surrounding you so the baseball doesn't escape once you've hit it. So at a batting cage, there's a bunch of physics, such as how the baseball will travel towards you at a certain velocity, and then you'll swing the bat at a certain velocity with a certain force, and if you've aimed correctly, both the bat and baseball will come in contact and apply a force onto each other. After that, the ball travels in the opposite direction which it had been thrown at. If you had wanted to find its velocity for whatever reason, you could have someone time when the ball had been hit, and the time it stayed in the air and finally hit the ground, already knowing the acceleration, and measuring the distance, you'd use an equation such as vf=vi+at or vf^2=vi^2+2ad. One thing I learned from the experience is that you should also wear gloves because the force from the ball can hurt your hand after you've hit it, this being because of friction between the bat and your hands.
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Hitting a wall
Today I want to tell you why punching a wall is always a bad idea, sometimes when we are mad and don't think clearly we hit a wall to release said anger without harming anyone, I guess thinking the wall will brake under the force. I'm here to tell you it won't harm anyone....but yourself. Admittedly our train of thought is clouded when we are mad but we must never forget that all forces come in pair of equal magnitude and opposite direction. This is VERY important because although most would think the wall is a static object and cant apply a force it does the exact opposite it will apply the same force you apply to it. So if you have the bright idea of pouncing a wall with say the force of 1000 newton's that wall will apply a 1000 newton force to you and most likely brake your hand. So next time you're mad remember newton's 3rd law and be civilized use a hammer to break down that wall.
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Senoritis
What is senioritis? As Juniors we all hear about it, we even claim by the end of the year that we have been contaminated by this disease. But not until senior year do we realize that we only had a small touch of this so called senioritis and left untreated over the summer days just worsened these symptoms. Senior year requires more and more responsibility and gives us the most freedom we have experienced in our 16 years. Balancing everything from school to volunteering to sports to college and life it can be over whelming. With all this responsibility doesn’t feel like there is freedom. In search for a break and our so called freedom we in a way shut down and become lazy and only do things we want to do instead of care for our new responsibility. Once it hits us that we need to get back onto the merry go round that never stops, it is hard to get back into the swing of things. There life is a reflection of newton’s law that states, an object at rest stays at rest unless acted upon an outside force. Object = us the humans, rest= ignoring our responsibilities, outside force= realization of this so call merry go round. Also to understand life we must understand Freedom=Responsibility
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Physics of Tennis
Physics and tennis go together like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich- Literally! I mean, how else do you think the ball is able to meet contact with the racket or what position the racket must be in to hit the ball? IT"S ALL PHYSICS! The fastest serve ever recorded in the world is 155MPH by the famous player Andy Roddick. But how is one able to do so? Well let me explain. When you toss the ball up in the air, the player will press their feet against the ground and build up on potential energy. Then rotating the hips, legs, shoulders and with the swing of the arm, all of that maximum energy is used to create a perfect cross-court serve. Occasionally if one hits a spectacular serve, you can get what is called an "ace". An ace is basically when your opponent does NOT meet any sort of contact with the ball, and of course you receive the winning point. Yay! Another way that tennis and physics are related is through topspin. A topspin is created when you hit your forehand shot (swinging low to high on the right side of your body and when the racket slides up and over the ball as it is struck.
This makes it so you created a lower angle to the ground, making is harder for your opponent to return the ball. Pretty cool huh? you just learned not only how tennis and physics are related, but also how to hit pretty cool forehand shots and serves! Hope this helped! -
Latest Entry
A Generational Approach To Student Loan Debt
While physics is not for everyone, there are hundreds of students in high school who genuinely love it. It is one of the more difficult subjects to get through, but it can feel very rewarding when you start to learn and understand what it's really all about. Many of these students come to enjoy it so much that they desire to go on to further schooling in college to earn a degree in physics.
For these students, and anyone applying for college, the tuition costs can be mind-boggling. Because of this, almost twelve million Americans attending school use some form of student aid to pay for school. However, if you do not know how to use financial aid properly, it can translate into a lot of loans, which then means thousands of dollars in debt. For students just coming out of high school, this is the last thing that they want to be hearing. Instead of becoming part of the statistics, find out more with this infographic and get informed on student loan debt.
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Reflection on Physics Class (third quarter)
Physics class is so interesting and attention grabbing to me. I enjoy physics class but only when I can totally understand what we're doing and what's going on. Right now we're working on circuits and electricity which I find really easy and fun. I like putting together circuits and seeing if they work or not. I like series circuits more than parallel circuits because it's easier to fill out the V IRP table than it is to fill out the table for a parallel circuit. Physics has been going fairly OK for me so far during the third quarter. I really tremendously appreciate the fact that Mr.Fullerton let us students make up the videos we'd missed over these past couple of weeks because I was behind on them but I'm all caught up now. I plan on doing really well on our next "celebration of learning" this week so that my grade can go up even higher. I plan on seeking extra help as well so that I can do my total best on each and every exam we have from now on, including the final exam
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God Bless Physics
I use to think physics was easy after watching the movie Ice Princess. But boy what I wrong! At least at first anyway. It took me awhile to understand physics because it is literally everything! Physics explains everything from why a balloon sticks to a chalkboard after you rub it in your hair, to why everything doesn't fall when you pull a table cloth from underneath it. Now that I understand that physics can do such cool things, I kind of like it! At the beginning of this chapter I thought I was going to die. I found it so hard and confusing, but now I understand it. It just took me awhile to understand the VIR charts and the circuit rules, but now that I get it, I feel confident about tomorrow's test! Go physics!
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Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Physics
Just over a month ago, when I walked into physics class for the first time, I thought it'd be a drag like all the other science classes I had to take. I was that girl who's heart was filled with trombone, head filled with music and the only reason for taking physics was because my counselor made me; I had absolutely no interest in the course and that was the attitude I assumed would carry throughout the entire year. Why did I care what physics had to do with my life? What did it matter?
Then, probably a week ago, I found myself thinking more and more about physics. When I looked around me, I started wondering what type of physics is involved at what I was seeing. What physics is involved in a trombone slide? What physics is involved with the sound I hear when music is played? While walking home, I began thinking about the physics of airplanes, of cars, of myself--and tonight it finally hit me that physics is all around, that it's everything. I'm seeing things in a new perspective; I'm questioning more, I want to learn more. I don't view things the way they appear anymore--I look at something and wonder how physics is involved. Even though in class we're still working on free-fall, I can't begin to describe how much I've learned so far--and it's only October.
Last month, I was just another girl forced to take another class she didn't care about. Today, I'm a person who's seeing everything differently; who constantly questions things and constantly wants to learn more, all because of physics.
And it's awesome.
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Uh-Oh.
This past March, scientists watched a Black Hole devour a star. It's roughly ten times the diameter of our Sun, but has about 8 million times the Sun's mass. NASA scientists recently made a great animation of what they saw for us mere mortals that have no idea what the people staring through the telescopes are talking about.
As for the unfortunate star, when it entered the black hole the energy in the star swirled around the black hole, forming a disc of light at millions of degrees and spinning at near the speed of light. The blast seen in the animation began at moving roughly 90% of the speed of light. The energy for this requires roughly one octillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) tons of matter moving at over 100,000 kilometers per second.
"There are more things on heaven and earth, Horatio, then are dreamt of in your philosophy."
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/08/26/star-eaten-by-a-black-hole-still-blasting-away/
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I Figured it out!
In response to hotdog's post of March 17th:
I know exactly how you feel hotdog. My first day in Honors Physics was perhaps the most stressful hour and a half of my life, but I knew I couldn't give up on the first day. I think the reason physics is so scary is because it's different from anything else. The things I learn in physics are so far removed from any of my past or current classes it can be very intimidating. Yes, you use the same math operations you used in Algebra, but the concepts are very different from other classes. This is also the reason physics is cool. If you understand it, you understand so much about the world. You can calculate or figure out just about anything you see in everyday life. Sometimes (actually, all the time) learning physics makes my brain ache, but it's worth it. I've been in honors physics for about nine weeks and I figured out how to do well in the class...don't freak out. When you don't understand something, all you have to do is ask your teacher or look at other resources (like your text book or youtube.) Its usually not as hard as I initially think it is and when I take a deep breath and focus, I can understand it, and earn an A! Another thing that helps is to keep an open mind, think outside of the box. Physics, like I said before, is sometimes different from other classes so it might not look familiar. Don't let this scare you though, because with the right attitude and mindset, everyone can succeed in physics class!
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the physics of a mousetrap car
Last week I began building a mousetrap car with a friend of mine who was given the assignment as an extra credit assignment in their physics class. Their assignment is to build a car whose sole source of energy is a mousetrap. Whoever's car goes the farthest wins. While doing my research I found a few ideas centered around physics that appeared most important to the success of our car.
large wheel to axel ratio
Due to the small size of a mousetrap we only have the ability to rotate an axle a small number of times. To make the car travel as far as possible and to turn the few rotations we have into as much distance as possible we can make the wheels significantly larger then the axle. In this way every full rotation of the axle gives us a significant amount of distance.
Have Some Friction, But Only Enough
Whenever a problem involves using energy as efficiently as possible you will want to decrease friction as much as possible however in this problem we have to be sure we do not remove friction too much. In the case of our back wheels we are going to need a certain amount of friction to ensure that the wheels turn. The force friction between the wheels and the ground will provide a torque to drive our car forward. If there is not enough friction on the wheels they may began to slip on the floor. If this happens our potential energy is being turned into the rotational motion of the wheels but not the translational motion of the car. In other words, we are wasting our precess energy.
Long Fulcrum
Increasing the length of our fulcrum will have an effect similar to that of our large wheels. By increasing the fulcrum we can increase the total distance that we can turn the axle. The Fulcrum is the radius of a circle created by its rotation. If we increase is length we increase the circumference of that that circle and therefore increase the distance that we can pull the axle over. This in turn leads to more rotations of the axle and more rotations of our wheels giving us more distance.
Other then this a lot of it is simply tinkering around with your design until you have maximized your distance with the tools and materials you have. Try it out and see what you think.
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The Doppler Effect
This week at The Lilac Festival, my mother and I experienced loads of different noises all at the same time. With loads of security, we heard lots of sirens passing us, creating the Doppler Effect. The Doppler Effect is the shift of frequency of a wave when a source moves past.
As a source with sound, such as a police car or security car, moves towards you, the frequency is smaller, which creates more of a high pitched sound. While moving, the frequency then begins to increase and after it passes you, the frequency is larger, making a lower sound.
To the human ear, the frequency increases quickly with the source, so the sound sounds like "neeeowwww." With so much chaos and Doppler Effect at the lilac festival, my mom and I decided to give our ears a break and go home early.
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My Experience in Physics Class
In response to purple15's post on March 17:
I had the same experience the first day/week of physics class. I had no idea what was going on and it was all new material to me. The review chapter was not so much of a review, but new learning. It also didn't help that the first week of class was self-taught because we had so many snow days! I thought I was doomed for sure, but I was proven wrong. I soon learned that physics can be applied to all aspects of life. I began to understand the concepts better by taking notes from the book and watching the videos posted by Dan Fullerton. Now physics is not something I dread, it's something that I look forward to because I am constantly learning something new.
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