Slinky's can perfectly represent the concepts of basic waves. First, if one person yanks the slinky to the left then quickly back once, a pulse is created. If they do this repeatedly, a wave is created. By making bigger waves, the amplitude will increase and by making faster waves, the frequency increases. If the person at the other end of the slinky decided to create waves as well, interference occurs where the two waves meet. If the waves are produced on the same side of the slinky, constructi
Playing with balloons was a fun childhood memory, but as we get older, we discover the physics that go hand in hand with the balloons. If you rub the balloon against your hair, then stick it to the wall it will stay there for a period of time. But how? When the balloon rubs against your hair, the balloon picks up a sum of electrons which makes the balloon negatively charged. The wall is an insulator so it will not steal the electrons, but instead the negative electrons will move as far away from
A handful of magnets are found on almost everyone's refrigerators at home. But how exactly do they work? To begin, the magnets on my fridge stick to it from both sides. When I attempt to make other metals stick to it, they simply fall. Therefore, the fridge must be magnetic attractable, meaning that it will be attracted to either side of a magnet and becomes polarized by the magnet. In addition, there are invisible magnet field lines on the magnet, flowing from north to south. The pictures of at
I'm pretty sure that everyone has heard the myth that an opera singer can shatter a wine glass with just the sound of his or her voice. But, it's not that easy; there is a lot of physics behind this phenomenon. In order to shatter the glass, the singers must sing a note that exactly matches the frequency of the glass. A slightly higher or lower note will not shatter the glass. But, how does the glass shatter? With the frequencies approaching the same, the glass will vibrate, or resonate, so much
As a firetruck flies by our classroom, the Doppler Effect is evident in the sound waves that it produces. The Doppler Effect is an increase or decrease in a waves frequency, in this case sound waves, as the source and viewer move closer and further from each other. Us, as students, are the viewers of the sounds that the sirens on the firetrucks who observe this change in frequency. The Doppler Effect explains why the sound that the sirens make gets louder when the sirens are closer and then slow
Newton's First Law can be clearly seen in a fun game that a lot of people might have in their basement, an air hockey table. If you neglect friction, it is pretty clean that once you hit the air hockey puck, it will keep moving until it hits the wall or the other teammate. This is a component of Newton's First Law because it says that an object that is in motion tends to stay in motion unless acted on by an outside force; the outside force, in this case would be the walls of the game. In additio
As we learned the entire unit, friction is fun! And there is nothing more fun than riding the ski slopes with your friends in the wintertime. And when you sit back and think about it a little bit, there is a lot of physics in skiing through the force of friction, a force that opposes motion. Static friction acts on a skier right before they start moving, which may be when the first leave the chairlift. According to the Regents Physics Reference Table, the coefficient for static friction on a ski
We can see physics in almost every roller coaster, but the ones that get really interesting are the ones that go upside down because those involve centripetal forces, a key term for physics studies. The period of the roller coaster is the amount of time it takes to complete one "loopty-loop", or one full revolution and can be modeled by T=t/revs. You could also figure out the number of full revolutions the roller coaster could make in one second using the formula f=1/t, which looks very similar
There actually is physics in midterms, and no, I don't mean just studying for the actual physics midterm. For example, when you are lifting and moving papers from one study location to another, you are doing work on that object. The farther you move the textbooks or study materials, or the more displacement that you move it, the more work you are doing on it. You can calculate the work you have done using W=fd. Another factor that goes into moving the books is the rate at which you do this, whic
Most of the physics in trampolines has to do with the topic we most recently covered which is springs. The only way that trampolines can be enjoyed in the summertime is by the use of physics through springs. Around the edge of every trampoline there are a series of springs connecting the metal outer ring to the elastic cloth on the inside. The force on the spring can determine how "bouncy" the trampoline is. For example, if a toddler were to jump on a trampoline there would be much less force on
Even though we may not recognize it, there is a great deal of physics in playing fetch with your dog. When you throw a Frisbee to your dog to go fetch, it will follow a parabolic path to the ground due to a gravitational force pulling it to the earth's surface. This gravitational acceleration is 9.81m/s^2 and can help one to calculate the initial velocity of when the Frisbee left the owners hand, or the final velocity of the Frisbee by taking into account how far the Frisbee went, its distance,
I am a varsity cheerleader and my brother, a sophomore at IHS, is our varsity quarterback. There is a great deal of physics involved in any sport, but in football it is very clear and evident. At the game just last week, I saw a perfect demonstration of the material in physics that we have been covering. As the quarterback, he frequently throws passes to his teammates. These passes follow a parabolic path from his hands to his teammates down the field. The path that the football takes is a proje
I work about 4 to 5 days a week at the local pizza shop, Cam's pizzeria. There, I answer phones, wait on tables, work the register, and yes, I do make pizza. To impress the children at a birthday party on a tour of the restuarant a couple of weeks ago, my boss pulls out all of his fancy tricks to make the children "ooo" and "ahhh". One of these tricks, applies to what we have been learning about in physics. As my boss tosses the pizza into the air during the making process, the concepts of physi
Until I took physics, I had no idea that it applied so much to my sport of cheerleading. I hadn't noticed that there was so much science in skills we practice everyday. One skill specifically uses a lot of physics that we have already studied this year. This skill is a stunt known as a basket toss. An example of one is shown in the clip at the bottom of this post. In this example, the athlete being thrown into the air has an initial velocity because she is being thrown into the air by the bases
