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Physics of Ironclad

So I was watching Ironclad and decided that I could use the movie to blog about physics stuff. The main character, Templar Knight Thomas Marshal was ridding around on his horse at Rochester castle, wailing his flair around, total bossing up those bad guys, when suddenly he is pulled off his horse. A huge crowd of bad guys form around him beating him with axes and hammers and stuff. Luckily our Templar Knight is tied to his stead who eventually/after an eternity, the horse decides it would be a

CharlieEckert

CharlieEckert

Why exercise makes you gain weight

Let’s say we have a person with a mass of 100 kg who can run at 5 m/s. Now we can make use of Einstein famous equation of E = MC2 :einstein) When the person is at rest, the total energy of the person is 100 * (3x108)2 or 9x1018 J When the person is running, their Kinetic energy can be defined as ½mv2 Ke = (½)*(100)* 52 Ke = 1250 J Therefore the person total energy is (9x1018 + 1250)J With a little reworking of the equation, we can get Δ m = (Ef – Eo) / (C2) Δ m = (1250 J / 9x1018 m2/s2)

CharlieEckert

CharlieEckert

The physics of Swim Paddles

The physics of Swim Paddles. Some times at swim practice our coach makes us use these paddles. These paddles typicality increase how far we go with each stroke while slowing down our stroke as it takes more force to pull. This because with the paddles, our hands have a greater surface area. When we pull our arms through the water, we pull more water behind us. Based on the law of conservation of momentum, if I catch and push more water at the same velocity backwards I will have a greater veloc

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

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

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 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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