As you may have figured out already, I tend to enjoy writing these blogs about sports and fairly dangerous activities...so I will continue this trend with curling. Although not the most exciting sport to watch, playing it is a whole different story due to two main physics principals: friction and collisions. Curling is played on a ice surface to allow the stone to glide easily and smoothly to the target because the friction between the ice and the stone is very little. If you've ever seen even o
Sports have been a large topic of focus in this here blog and i will continue that trend with a new application of physics...BASKETBALL. Now many people may think that basketball is a simple game of putting a ball in a hoop but it is much more complicated. Im only going to focus on the free throw in this post. The first part of the free throw is lining up your shot. This takes practice in order to learn the typical trajectory of your shot so that you now what angle to shoot it with, the amount
In the history of the world, there have been millions of bombs dropped by any nation during a war. However, what most people never think about is the physics behind dropping a bomb. The bombardier must take into consideration the speed at which they are flying, the horizontal distance away from their target and the height at which they are flying. Say, for example, the average B-42 bomber has a cruise altitude of 39,00 ft (12,000 m) and a cruise speed of 545 mph (926 kph). If a bomb were to be d
Another idea that came up while flying to Florida was the principle of relative motion. When ever people are traveling they are usually only focused on their speed and not that of others. However, as i looked out of the window, I saw another plane in the open sky and it seemed that it was going much faster than us. However, knowing the principle of relative motion, i realized that we were most likely flying at similar speeds and it only seemed that the other place was flying fast because we were
As all Rochesterians know, winter driving is not easy and can get out of hand very easily. But why? Well it is rather simple. The added snow and ice on the road causes the coefficient of friction between the tires and the road to be much much smaller. Using the equation Ff=uFn with Ff being the force of friction, u being the coefficient of friction and Fn being the normal force we can see that when the coefficient of friction decrease (while the normal force is kept constant) the force due to fi
