Grace21's Blog

There's tons of physics in volleyball. But the most recent physics I've noticed is that after really long plays the ball is actually warm. This shows transfer of energy. The energy from the players is transferred to the ball which after a while can make the ball warm.

There's a ton of physics in snowboarding! There's some friction, which you don't want a lot of that way you can go faster, and a bunch of other cool stuff like power, work, and energy. You can figure out how much work you do going down a mountain by multiplying the distance of the slope by the amount of force used. You can also find out your power by using the work and dividing that by the amount of time it took you to get down the mountain. You can also figure out the amount of energy it took you... pretty cool stuff.

The equation for power is p=w/t, or work divided by time. I thought it was really cool how we were able to calculate the power someone has going up the stairs as fast as they can. We did this in the lab by calculating the work done and then dividing that by the time it took the person to go up the stairs. I also thought that it was really cool that we could figure out the amount of horsepower of a person. I never realized how powerful some cars were until we figured out that one person barely has one horsepower. So for a car to have hundreds is kind of intimidating.

There's a lot of physics in lifting weights. For example, you can calculate the amount of work a person does. The equation for work is w=fd, or force times distance. When a person is lifting weights, you can calculate the amount of work they are doing by multiplying the distance they are lifting the weight by how much the weight is.

Most people know that court shoes are different from regular shoes, but many people don't realize that there are different types of court shoes. Volleyball shoes differ because they have different types of rubber in different areas on the bottom. The rubber that has the most friction typically goes on the balls of the foot, a thin piece along the outside edge, and the heels. This is because volleyball players spend most of there time on there toes. The friction between the rubber and the court prevents the player from slipping because the rubber causes a larger force of friction.

This weekend I went to watch the team my brother coaches. While I was watching I realized that a lot of forces are involved. Obviously the force of gravity and the normal force so the puck and players don't go through the ice or into the air. Also, the force that the players put on the puck, pushing it to each other. I also realized that hockey applies to newton's first law! An object at rest stays at rest unless acted upon by an outside force. The puck stays in the same spot until a player pushes it.

While playing volleyball, pretty much everything involves physics. For example, when serving a ball it's a projectile and accels downward at 9.81 m/s squared. It also involves forces because the ball gets pushed in different directions at different forces from different people.

Today in class somebody brought up the movie Christmas Vacation when talking about friction. We were talking about the friction between skis and snow, so we asked if it was possible for the skiis to catch fire if you go fast enough like in Christmas vacation when friction burned a hole through Griswold's sled. But Mr. Fullerton explained that it's not really possible because of the chemical that they put in the wax you use on your skis.

I've been trying to get in better shape so I've been running on the treadmill. While bored running on the treadmill, it occurred to me that Newton's third law applies to running! I always thought my knees hurting while running was caused by having bad knees but really it's the force of the treadmill back on me! As I put force on the treadmill the treadmill puts a force back on me. However the treadmill has a much larger mass than I do therefore it hurts my knees!