Blog midnightpanther

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.

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...

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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 painstakingly having to move the ladder every 5 feet we could just roll them up once they were on the ground. My plan worked almost perfectly, she took off one and then dropped it, and as the wire became taught, this tension force going down combined with the force of gravity pulling down was enough to over come the clips and remove the next light. However, what I did not forsee was that as more lights fell, there was an increased mass hanging down every time so the force that was pulling them down became more accelerated every time, and after a few of the lights were hanging the others started coming off faster than anticipated and they were shattering upon impact with our yard. Needless to say this was not the best option for removing the lights but if you don't mind a lot of broken glass and having to replace all the bulbs ever year, this is the fastest option there is.

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 do with rotational motion, I am not sure. Also, while watching I noticed that as they pulled on the ropes they were leaning very far forward and making pretty small angles with the ground. I thought that this was a very good idea because while pulling standing straight up some of their effort would be turned into vertical forces, which would be wasted. By being more horizontal with the ground, their horizontal force would be greater found by solving Fcos and the closer this angle is to zero, the more of their force would be put into the horizontal direction. The best time to pull the bus was right around one minute, and after looking on google again I will estimate that the bus weighs about 22000 pounds, and from this I can estimate that the work they did was around 396000J over the entire pull.

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 gravity pulling him down. So when swimming, he wants to apply a force to the water, and because of Newton's second law, the water would then apply the same force to him, making him more, similar to how we walk. So, knowing that the sum of the forces=mass times acceleration, and because I don't really know how long it took him, we'll just estimate it took 10 minutes. Based on the fact that it took him about 10 minutes to go 500 meters we can find his average velocity to be about .83m/s. Then, after looking up on google that the drag for water is around .5 for a sphere (his head) we can find the force of friction to be 80N. Then using this we can solve for the net force which would mean he is doing applying 120N of force for ten minutes giving him a work of .2N/s. This does not make any sense.

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, and turns the air around it warm. Also, there is a space behind the heat box where there is space for air, and a fan that is below the fireplace. The fan sucks in the air from the bottom which is cooler because hot air rises, and then it goes into the pocket where the heat is transferred from the heat box into the air and then it is blown back out the top into the room where it can heat our house during these nippy winter days. Just so we are clear, hot air rises because when the air is colder, the molecules come closer together, and this slightly increases the density of the air, and as it heats up the molecules move faster and spread out more, allowing the hot air to sit on top of the cold air.

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, then the puck had an initial negative velocity and therefore a negative momentum. Then, using his stick as a lever and his hand as a pivot point, he applied a torque to the stick and then a force to the puck. The collision was elastic, and while coming towards Ott the puck was moving pretty slowly, but after contact with the large positive momentum of the stick, the puck goes in the opposite direction with a much larger velocity, after recieving a large impulse from the stick. Obviously all of this was going through his head when he shot the puck and therefore scored the first goal of the Sabres season.

Go Sabres

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 the hardest so far is the integrals and doing things like that but I think that I have started to figure it out more recently. I also very much enjoyed the catapult project because it was a good way to take some of the stress out of the class by letting us build something out of school that didn't really involve way too much actual mathematical physics so just the building and the testing and the launching of the catapults was very fun. I am enjoying the class so far and I hope to continue enjoying it the rest of the year.

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 the serve to be in, after you hit the ball it must bounce on your side of the table, and then on the opponents side, but as we all know, the ball never actually touches the table or the paddle. The magnetic forces of the electrons of the ball push against the magnetic forces of the table causing what appears to be the ball touching the table, while in actuality no contact occurs. Thanks to physics I can easily say that I have never lost a game of ping pong in my career.

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 the road, it creates an equal force applied to the center of mass of the vehicle,and once the moment of this overcomes the force of gravity, the front wheels pop up.

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 sprayed into the cylinder. Then, the spark plug fires and ignites the gas, and as said in Boyle's law if the temperature increases and the volume remains the same, the pressure will decrease and the cylinder will open up, but then once opened, the heat from the explosion dissapates some and then the increased pressure will pull the cylinder back to the almost closed position. Or at least this is how I think it works.

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 higher he releases, the higher the ball will go but not as far, and to throw the maximum distance he should throw about 45 degrees. Also, he must throw with a certain initial velocity to get the ball to a certain place faster or slower, and to get it the proper distance. Also, the momentum of football is something that we can easily consider. When on football player tackles another, they generally stay together, making this an inelastic collision. For the momentum to be conserved, the mass and velocity of the first football player must be the same as the second, or else the tackle will be broken, or the tackler will knock the ball carrier back.