So lately, our physics C teacher has been making us to equation dumps at the beginning of each class. He would give us 4 minutes to write down as many equations as we could, thus seeing how much we had already memorized and how prepared we were for the upcoming exam. To put down as many equations in those 4 minutes not only requires raw knowledge but also strategy involving.... wait for it... PHYSICS!!!:apple: So, the goal in those 4 minutes was to write down 50 equations. That means you wou
Last year, i was blow-drying my little sister's hair and when i put the blow-dryer into the outlet, i got shocked. When i inserted the plug into the outlet, i accidentally put my finger too close to where the circuit was completed. I then realized that i completed a circuit when i plugged in the hair dryer. I did a little more research. I found out that the voltage of an outlet in a home is 120 Volts. Then i did research to find out the resistance in the blow-dryer. The blow-dryer i used h
Believe it or not, rubber bands display the law of conservation of momentum very clearly. When a rubber band is pulled back by a person applying a force to it, it doesn't have any momentum because the velocity of the rubber band is zero. So when the rubber band is released, it gains velocity and therefore has momentum. So then how would this action demonstrate conservation of momentum? Well, the rubber band causes the person who released it to experience a recoil force. Since the rubber ban
In our everyday world, mechanics that work with cars in autoshops work with a physics concept that we all know and love: Torque! Cars are working machines that are assembled by many parts and those parts are held together by bolts and screws and lug nuts. Tools such as wrenches and pliers allow mechanics to secure parts by putting the nuts and bolts on the car.
Torque is equal to the applied force times the radius or length from the fulcrum of the object. (T= Fr) To ensure that a l
During the AFC football game yesterday night, the wind was blowing really strong from one end of the field to the other. That can be a good and a bad thing for the offenses on each team. The offense driving into the wind will have their quarterback's passes subjected to the wind and his passes won't travel as far. But for the quarterback and his offense traveling the other way, his passes will be thrown with the wind, thus making his passes travel farther with the wind carrying them to some d
Our bodies conduct physics every second of everyday. Our bodies pump blood. Initially, one may think that the mere action of pumping blood has no correlation with physics at all. On the contrary, the blood in our bodies must be pumped through muscle contraction and applied force as well as pressure. Last year in physics B, we learned quite a bit about fluid mechanics and the relationship between force, pressure and area of the tube the fluids travel through. As our heart initially pumps blo
I aspire to be involved in the medical field once i finish my schooling and one of the tools i hope to use is a centrifuge. Centrifuges are tools where test tubes are inserted into spaces around the outside of the tool. It then spins in a circle and the more it spins, the contents in the beakers are separated into their components. The contents in these beakers mostly consist of blood samples and organelles that need to be separated to be analyzed. Centrifuges use the centripital force to se
Ever since i saw my first Jackie chan movie (which i cannot remember off the top of my head), i have always been curious how a man, not especially strong and bulky with the muscles most football players possess, can break a cinder block in half with his bare hands. I previously thought that the cinder block would be too strong for even the most muscular man to even crack it let alone break it.
In this video, the person had two thick bricks stacked on top of each other and he broke bot
One activity i love to do is ski. I love the exhilarating feeling of going really fast down a steep incline. But in order to attain a fast speed, one must have good form to minimize AIR RESISTANCE. If someone were to go down a steep trail with their torso revealed with their arms extented out, they will reveal a ton of surface area and thus, the air will have more to make contact with. In turn, that person will not go as fast as they possibly could.
But if someone has good form that can m
There are many sharp turns we encounter when we drive at high speeds on the highways. And even just driving straight down a highway, cars can lose control and accidents can happen. Friction is a concept and a force that plays a huge role in keeping cars on the road. The coefficient of kinetic friction, Meu, is what measures the ratio of the force of friction and the normal force of the object on that surface. It can help us find the maximum speed at which the car can stay stable on the road
Many people might not think it but the meat-heads who body build conduct physics related actions everyday when they go to the gym. The weights they lift are objects that apply a force to the muscles that are targeted in different exercises. Newton's second law, net force= mass x acceleration (F=ma) shows that force is equal to the mass times the acceleration. So the weights that people lift when they work out have a mass that is accelerated by gravity to produce the force overcome by muscle m
I am a man who loves baseball and when i figured out that physics plays a huge role in pitching, i got excited. Physics is exhibited very well in curveballs. A curveball is a pitch that was named for its movement; it curves on its path towards home plate as it reaches the batter.
The pitcher grips the ball on the side just over one of the seems and when he throws it, he flicks his wrist hard creating the ball to spin sideways as it travels forward towards the plate. As it shows in the diag
We recently built catapults as a project assigned by our physics teacher. Our goal for this project was to maximize the distance of the projectile, which in this case was a softball. We either had the choice of building a catapult or a trebuche but we decided to build a catapult. Using our knowledge of two dimensional motion, we set out to build a catapult that would launch the projectile at the optimal angle with the most applied force. We placed a wooden beam on our catapult at the spot th
The varsity cross country team decided to get mowhawks to get pumped up for thier sectional race this past saturday. As a member of the cross country team i got one as well. Most of our runners had long enough hair to spike it and create very large and excentuated mowhawks. I didn't have enough hair to do that so i got the sides of my hair shaved off and my mowhawk looks like a drag strip right down the middle of my head. This type of mowhawk has some very unique properties. As a runner, i
So the world series for baseball happened not too long ago and something amazing happened. Hunter pence, an outfielder for the San Francisco Giants, broke his bat when swinging at a pitch but his bat hit the ball three times after he made initial contact.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOkbQVsIk_0
The ball made contact with the bat initially a few inches above the handle where he was holding it. In the video, you could see that the bat bent out as it was breaking and began to bend t
i have always been curious how it would be to drop an object from the top of the empire state building. It is obviously a long way down but exactly how fast would an object be traveling once it hit the ground? If i were to drop a golf ball for example, how fast would that travel? Well we can do this using my knowledge of one dimensional motion, a key physics concept. Acceleration due to gravity is -9.81 m/s for any object no matter the mass. Using our kinematic equations we can find out the
I am very interested in physics and in learning how different things work in the world around us. i class we learned the dot product and cross product and applied them briefly to kinematics in our first day of that unit. Although those are two very new concepts to me relating to vector math, i am interested in grasping the new concepts and applying them to my growing knowledge of physics.
i wanted to take physics to gain more knowledge about what this area of science has to offer. i am v
