Jump to content
  • entries
    41
  • comments
    43
  • views
    10,595

About this blog

Entries in this blog

Jason Padgett sees the world in Math equations!

Jason Padgett has Acquired Savant Syndrome. 10 years ago he was beaten and kicked in the head by some muggers after his jacket. While recovering in the hospital he became obsessed with mathematical equations. Apparently the damage to his head allows him to view everything he sees as a Math equation! Padgett turns these formulas into intricate diagrams called fractals. Prior to his accident Padgett was a college drop out and had never taken a college level math class before. An example of his wo

CharlieEckert

CharlieEckert

Last blog post

So I was reserving my last blog post for my momentum video I made last year. Unfortunately I couldn't find it last night. I went to Mr. Powlin today to get the video but it wouldn’t upload to the site, or to my email or Google drive for some reason. I’ll try to find the video again tonight, but if I can’t just picture me getting shot bare skin with an airsoft gun.

CharlieEckert

CharlieEckert

Benefits of Nuclear Fallout

I found an interesting article about how nuclear fallout has aided in studies on brain development. Nuclear fallout introduced small amounts of carbon 14 into our atmosphere. When our cells divide, they incorporate carbon from the environment. So the carbon 14 released from nuclear bombs eventually makes it way into the human body. This means that carbon 14 can be used to measure the age of cells. A team at the Karolinska Institute used this to show that new neurons were produced in a small part

CharlieEckert

CharlieEckert

Course Reflection

I figured I would finish my blog posts with a reflection of how physics went this year. At the beginning of the year, Mr. Fullerton introduced us to integrals. I had absolutely no idea what how to do them since we hadn’t covered it in math yet. Fortunately by the time they finally came up on a test, we had gotten to them and calc and I finally understood them. Overall the calculus included in the course was fairly basic and wasn’t very hard. The independent units were definitely something new

CharlieEckert

CharlieEckert

The Oh-My-God Particle

So I read something really interesting about a particle called the “Oh-My-God particle”. Detected on October 15th, 1991 the particle was a proton that was traveling at nearly the speed of light. In fact it was traveling at 99.99999999999999999999951% of the speed of light. The proton had the energy equivalent of a baseball traveling about 100 kilometers per hour (imagine getting hit in the head and knocked out by a particle too small to see). Even the particles produced in our particles accelera

CharlieEckert

CharlieEckert

Fusion power

Nuclear energy has been used since the 1950s. However all nuclear power plants have been fission reactors. Fission results from bombarding uranium or other large atoms with neutrons. The atom then breaks apart releasing energy and more neutrons leading to a chain reaction. Nuclear fusion however has never been used for energy. Fusion is when two light atomic nuclei fuse to form a heavier nucleus, vast amounts of energy is produced comes from binding energy due to the strong nuclear force. Fusion

CharlieEckert

CharlieEckert

Dark Energy

Since I’ve already done a blog on dark matter I thought why not do one on dark energy as well! Like dark matter, the existence of dark matter has yet to be proven. Despite this, dark energy is theorized to ‘exist’ in very large quantities. Current models have dark energy occupying 68.3% of the universe. So if we can’t prove dark energy exists why do physicists believe it exists? Well because it’s the only thing that would explain why the universe is accelerating. We know from red shift that the

CharlieEckert

CharlieEckert

Antimatter

Antimatter is a very strange concept in physics. Antimatter consists of anti particles that have the same size and mass as their corresponding ‘regular matter’ but opposite charge. For instance a positron is the size of an electron but contains a positive charge. The current theory for the universe, the Big Bang Theory, predicts that an equal amount of matter and anti matter were present at the beginning of the universe. But today, anti matter occupies a negligible amount of the universe’s compo

CharlieEckert

CharlieEckert

Water bottle rocket

So I figured I’d, write about why our water bottle rocket failed so miserably on arts fest. Our goal was to use parachutes that would cause our rocket to slowly descend to the ground. Instead of using just one, we figured using two would slow our rockets fall even more. In theory this would have worked fine, however when our rocket reached its maximum height and the nose cone fell off exposing the parachutes, instead of fully opening, the two chutes tangled together and didn’t fully open. The un

CharlieEckert

CharlieEckert

bungee cord physics

Well, I thought of yet another aspect of swimming to analyze for my blogs posts!!! Sometimes at practice we use these bungee or stretch cords to work on resistance training. The premise is simple, strap one end around your self, and the around the block at the end of the lanes. The bungee cords act just like a spring in that F = -Kx, the further the displacement the larger the force. As you get closer and closer to the other end of the pool, the force pulling you back becomes larger and larger.

CharlieEckert

CharlieEckert

Dark Matter

It seems the search to prove the existence of the elusive Dark Matter might soon come to a close. A Minnesota mine, half a mile under ground, seems to have detected the existence of Dark Matter. For those of you who don't what Dark Matter is, I'll give a brief explanation. The ordinary matter that we can visibly see makes up an estimated 15.5% of the universe. Planets, Stars and pretty much everything else in space is made up of ordinary matter. However 84.5% of the universe's matter is estimate

CharlieEckert

CharlieEckert

This quater

Reiterating Dave's recent blog post, I thought I would review what this last quarter has been like. So this quarter covered the E&M portion of the Physics C course. My general opinion is that the jump from Physics B to Physics C was far easier for mechanics than the jump for E&M. From the first two exams I learned that I was horrendously bad at the E&M free responses. I also found while taking the test, I would realize that I didn't really understand the material as well as I though

CharlieEckert

CharlieEckert

Pain Pong

So last night the swim team got together for some pizza and to hang out. Being highly intelligent teenagers, we decided to play some pain pong. For those of you who aren't familiar with pain pong, it is a variant of ping pong where everything you loose the point you turn around and your opponent smashes the ball with the paddle at your bare back. Naturally if your quite bad at ping pong(like me) the game can get very painful, but why? Well its because of physics, more specifically impulse! Δp=

CharlieEckert

CharlieEckert

Electromagnetic Rail Gun

The navy is developing a prototype for an Electromagnetic Rail Gun. The Rail Gun would be use massive magnetic fields to accelerate a projectile at over 5000 miles per hour. The projectiles would have so much kinetic energy that warheads would become unnecessary components to the projectile. The projectile would be able to devastate a bunker just by making impact with it, making explosives unnecessary. Clearly such a weapon would be extremely useful in a wartime situation.

CharlieEckert

CharlieEckert

My take on our independent unit

This is our second independent unit in a row, meaning we haven't had traditional class in a very long time. This one seems a bit more difficult then previous ones though. Unlike previous independent units, I don't remember much about magnetism from last year making it more difficult. Magnetism also employs more complicated math like cross products and calculus based equations then the other independent units. I found it hard to understand the textbook and the only thing that stands out from the

CharlieEckert

CharlieEckert

Circuits

Don't understand the relationship between current, voltage and resistance? Maybe this picture will help! [ATTACH=CONFIG]630[/ATTACH]

CharlieEckert

CharlieEckert

Superconducting Levitation

I found the most amazing video of superconductor levitating from a magnetic field. You absolutely have to watch this video!!! So basically a sapphire is coated with yttrium barium copper oxide. When cooled to -301oF, the saphire becomes a superconductor. The superconductor experiences no electrical resistance. For some reason the magnetic fields aren't able to penetrate because the superconductor expels fields from the inside. This leads to something called quantum locking which holds the superc

CharlieEckert

CharlieEckert

Thermodynamics

Has your hand ever been so cold that it went numb? Well how about when it was 90o and you were outside in the sun, no, well this has happened to me before. Over the summer I worked part time at clover home leisure. Part of my job was to fill up propane tanks. Normally not a big deal, but sometimes we get massive propane tanks with purge valves. While filling, the purge valve forces the air out. When tank is done filling, the purge value starts spitting out massive amounts of propane. Propane sto

CharlieEckert

CharlieEckert

World's Strongest Magnet

The Mag lab near Tallahassee has created a 45 Tesla Magnet. This Magnet is 800,000 more powerful than the earth magnetic field. The Magnet was build by placing a coil of wire inside a coil of wire inside a coil of wire ... creating a massive magnetic field. The Magnet proved so strong that a camera crew lost half its recordings just by being in the same building as the magnet.

CharlieEckert

CharlieEckert

The usefulness of physics

Have you ever wondered if physics would be applicable to your life? How can you make what you learned in physics useful? Well Physicist Dmitri Krioukov used physics to get out of paying a $400 traffic ticket. Dmitri Krioukov wrote a paper titled "The Proof of Innocence" to explain to the judge that his traffic violation for running a stop sign was the result of the officer suffering from an optical illusion. The end result, Mr Krioukov no longer has to pay the ticket!! This proves one of two th

CharlieEckert

CharlieEckert

Pain Pong to the extreme

Well i thought my last post was about the physics of pain pong(a painful variant of ping pong) was pretty crazy. Well a professor from Brigham Young University took it to a whole new extreme. Professor Harold Stokes used a cannon to launch a ping pong ball at himself at over 500 mile per hour. Now that's dedication to teaching!!!

CharlieEckert

CharlieEckert

The physics of hypothetically cheating at swim practice

The physics of hypothetically cheating at swim practice. During Saturday practices, our coach has us do stations. One of these stations involves sprinting with a parachute. As you can see the parachute is quite small but despite this, it still creates a whole lot of drag. The parachute is very thin and creates a large pocket that water gets trapped into. As the parachute is pulled through the water, the water getting caught in the pocket creates drag. Now 100% hypothetically speaking if anyone

CharlieEckert

CharlieEckert

University of Michigan has developed a coating that repeals virtually any liquid

Engineering researchers at the University of Michigan have crated a nanoscale coating that is super effective at repelling liquids. The major difference between this coating and other coating is that with other coatings, liquids with very low surface tensions such as oils, alcohols, and organic acids stick to the coating and eventually diffuse through the coating; however with this coating, even liquids with low surface tensions are repelled. After testing well over a 100 liquids, the team at Mi

CharlieEckert

CharlieEckert

The physics of lane line reels

So at yesterdays practice my coach made us take out the lane lines and put them on the reel after practice. As we spin the reel, the reel becomes increasing difficult to spin because the additional mass of the lane lines. I decided it would be a great blog post to find out how much the moment of inertia changes for the reel once all of the lane lines are put on. I’m going to make some rough estimates on the dimensions of the reel since I couldn’t find them online and I can’t go in and measure

CharlieEckert

CharlieEckert

The Physics of the PowerTower

The physics of the Powertower. So as previously mentioned in another blog, on the Saturday practices we do stations. One of the stations is doing sprints with THE POWERTOWER. What’s a Powertower you ask? Well if you have ever been to the pool and seen those giant red buckets attached to the metal frame thingy, that’s the Powertower. I’ve included a picture because I’m guessing none of you know what I’m talking about. [ATTACH=CONFIG]583[/ATTACH] Anyways we fill the buckets with water and a b

CharlieEckert

CharlieEckert

×
×
  • Create New...