Jump to content
  • entries
    33
  • comments
    8
  • views
    2,808

Entries in this blog

Volleyball 3.0

Gravitational force, or the force of attraction between an object and the Earth, has an impact on every element of Volleyball. Whether you are serving, bumping, or spiking, gravity will affect every interaction you have with the ball. Spiking: When you spike a volleyball, you have the opportunity to deliver a crushing offensive blow to your opponent. When spiking, you exert a downward force on the ball so that it falls rapidly on the opponent's side of the court, making it very difficult for you

JesseLefler

JesseLefler

Volleyball 2.0

Work: Work is when a force moves an object. In Volleyball, the force is the player and the object is the ball. When the player hits, spikes, or serves the ball it moves in the direction in which the force has been applied. Hopefully, that direction will be over the net, when spiking or serving, and to the target when bumping. Velocity: Velocity is the speed of movement. You can figure out the velocity of a volleyball shot by dividing the distance your ball traveled by the amount of time it took

JesseLefler

JesseLefler

Volleyball

Sir Isaac Newton, is said to be, the greatest English mathematicians of his generation. He laid the foundation for differential and integral calculus. His work on optics and gravitation make him one of the greatest scientists the world has known. Newton's laws of motion are three physical laws that form the basis for classical mechanics, and describe the relationship between the forces acting on the body and its motion due to these forces. Newton's laws affect every aspect of our life, therefore

JesseLefler

JesseLefler

Videogames Physics

If you ever played any type of fighting game you've probably witnessed at some point in time that you are mashing every button to improve your chances of winning. The action of button mashing involves quite a bit of physics. For every push down of the button physics in involved, starting with the press of the buttons for each time you push the button down the button applies the same amount of force back onto your finger. That is called the normal force. Every time the button comes back up to its

JesseLefler

JesseLefler

Tug o War

After learning about Newton's 3rd Law, I thought about tug of war. I now know that when someone on one side of the rope is pulling on the rope, the force the person is applying to the rope and the force the rope is applying to the person are equal, no matter how hard the person is pulling. However, although the magnitude of the forces are equal, the direction of them are opposite, since the person is pulling the rope towards him/her and the rope is pulling away from the person. Also, I look can

JesseLefler

JesseLefler

Trampoline

My neighbor owns a giant trampoline that my brother and I use quite often in the summer time. But at the moment it is covered in snow so rather than actually using it I can think of all the ways that physics is involved in jumping on a trampoline. Newton's 3rd Law is a large part of jumping on my trampoline because the law states that all forces come in pairs. For example, when I jump up and down, I push down on my trampoline with the same magnitude but opposite direction that is pushes me up wi

JesseLefler

JesseLefler

The Physics of Golf

I first began golfing during the summer prior to my freshman year of high school. Obviously, like all things, I was far from good when I first started. Although I had played baseball for years I still found it very difficult to strike the ball the way that I was supposed to. Because of my constant miss-hitting on the golf ball, I never was able to get the correct flight trajectory that all of my friends were getting. I quickly realized that golf was not nearly as easy as it had seemed and that I

JesseLefler

JesseLefler

Surfing

This spring break I got to fly down to Florida to visit my friend Henry! Henry is a big surfer so while I'm down there I'm going to get to learn to surf along with him. With break now approaching, i figured it would be a good opportunity to look into a little bit of the physics of surfing! First there is a lot of basic application such as the fact that the force that the board exerts on the water, is exactly equal to the force the water exerts onto the board. However as a researched more I found

JesseLefler

JesseLefler

Sunflower Seeds

As I'm sure many of you know eating sunflower seeds is a very popular task and one that is full of physics. Such as when you are biting down on the seed to crack it you are putting a force down onto the seed that is needed to crack but did you know that the seed is putting a force onto you. Indeed the seed is putting a force onto you called the normal force. This helps allow you split the shell. Now when you spit out the sunflower seed you are doing a kinetic equation that will affect the distan

JesseLefler

JesseLefler

Soccer 2.0

Magnus Effect: The force exerted on a rapidly spinning cylinder or sphere moving through air or another fluid in a direction at an angle to the axis of spin. This force is responsible for the swerving of balls when hit or thrown with spin.  A soccer ball is basically a projectile that is flying through the air because of velocity provided to it by kicking the ball. The reason for a curve ball is because a player kicks the ball at a certain angle and a certain velocity. When you juggle the ball i

JesseLefler

JesseLefler

Soccer

Soccer physics explains why the soccer ball curves, why it bounces, and how high it goes, as well as how the pressure in the ball affects the bounce or kick of the ball.  Newton's First Law: An object at rest tends to stay at rest and an object in motion tends to stays in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force. That applies to juggling a soccer ball because the unbalanced force could be gravity or wind; but in this case it is the player's fo

JesseLefler

JesseLefler

Soccer

I played soccer for about 3 years, and never understood that physics applies to all aspects of the sport, as it does to every sport. For example, kicking the ball into the air is an example of projectile motion. The ball is launched at a certain angle above the ground, or the horizontal, and lands back on the ground. During this entire time, the ball is being acted upon by gravity, causing the acceleration to be 9.81 m/s^2. Also, when the ball reaches it's maximum height, its velocity is 0 m/s.

JesseLefler

JesseLefler

Slinky

A slinky is an extremely fun toy if you are 3 years old, or even 83 years old! The way it transfers energy back and forth throughout it is very similar to a wave. A wave can either be longitudinal or transverse, but in this case, a slinky is like a longitudinal wave. It bunches up at some points, but then expands out with different distances between each metal ring. Waves are found in every day life such as jump rope as well. As you spin the rope constantly around, it represents half of a wave.

JesseLefler

JesseLefler

Roller Coasters

When riding a roller coaster, gravity is one of the main forces. When the cart on the roller coaster travels to the top of the hill, it’s the acceleration due to gravity that brings it back to the start. When the cart gets to all the way up to the top of the hill, gravity ends up pulling it down. The cart starts at a slow pace but gets faster as it approaches the bottom. As it begins to climb to the next hill, the speed slows down. This is because the acceleration due to gravity is 9.81 m/s^2. A

JesseLefler

JesseLefler

Radar Guns

Some people might say that snow or rain or other forms of bad weather would be the easiest way to cause people to drive slower and safer, but in reality a police officer sitting on the side of the road is the easiest way to make everyone slow down. You will never see a more drastic change in people's driving behavior. A person could be going upwards of 80 mph but the second they realize their is a police officer, they immediately slow down usually to below the speed limit to guarantee they don't

JesseLefler

JesseLefler

Popcorn

Most popcorn lovers take for granted that a simple kernel of corn can metamorphose into a fluffy treat. But to a pair of French researchers, the popping of corn presents a powerful demonstration of how the laws of physics apply to everything — even a snack food. Until now, most research on popcorn has been focused on practical questions. Food chemists determined that the optimum moisture content of a kernel is 13.5% to 14% of its total weight. Food engineers concluded that the ideal shape for an

JesseLefler

JesseLefler

Physics of board breaking

Many martial artists aspire to be able to break through ice, brick and/or wood blocks simply by hitting such object with their hand. But how hard or easy is this? In reality it is far easier than one may originally think. Consider a one inch thick piece of pine wood, because of Newton’s Third Law, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, if we consider the hand/forearm and board as the whole system, there was on the whole system no net force that affected the impact. Therefore,

JesseLefler

JesseLefler

Magnets

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

JesseLefler

JesseLefler

Jumprope

For volleyball, my coach encourages people to jump rope in order to get "fast feet." As I was jump roping, I realized all of the physics that plays a role in this. I thought about how we are in the waves unit and I was creating a standing wave as I did my exercise. Afterwards, I wanted to calculate my velocity as I was jumping so I estimated that it took me 2 seconds for the rope to go around one time, and the distance of the rope was about 4 meters long. Using the equation velocity= distance/ti

JesseLefler

JesseLefler

Jesse's Blog

This is my first of too many blog posts that are required for this class. As many know I have the most fire twitter in all of IHS, I recently accomplished my goal of reaching 7.2 followers which is pretty sweet. I also dabble in the arts of CYO basketball, golf and volleyball. I have a countless amount of strengths and virtually no weaknesses. My only downfall that seems to hinder the performance of my work is that generally I don't care enough to put in any effort. However, I strive every day t

JesseLefler

JesseLefler

Iron Man

Throughout the Iron Man franchise, tony stark uses an arc reactor to stop shrapnel from piercing his heart, but how is this done. Well to begin with, when yinsen attach a magnet tostark's chest to use the laws of magnetism. By having the electromagnet facing the south side, it allowed the shrapnel to stop moving towards his heart and move still facing the magnet. Even still when stark made an upgraded arc reactor and told pepper to help him fix it into his chest. When pepper removed the magnet w

JesseLefler

JesseLefler

Fast & Furious

In the movie Furious 7 there was a really cool scene where they dropped their high end cars out of a military plane with parachutes with the drivers in them in hopes to land on a road and continue driving. To shoot the scene they actually did it dropping two cars out at a time with parachutists following on the way down with cameras. At 12,000 feet the skydivers had to follow the cars at the angles needed and dodged falling debris. The shooting for this movie not only took caution and creativity

JesseLefler

JesseLefler

Effects of rain on driving

Now that we have reached that terrible time of year where mother nature can't make up her mind whether it should be warm, cold, raining or sunny, it is scarier than ever to drive with my father. Everyone in my family knows that he is by far the worst driver. (Even worse than me even though I've had my license for less than a year). It's not that he doesn't stay in the lines or anything, his biggest problem is that he is the most impatient driver I have ever driven with. He constantly goes way fa

JesseLefler

JesseLefler

Driving

I am a horrendous driver. Perhaps reviewing the physics of driving will somehow make me a better driver. There's probably some sort of correlation between driving a car and all the other units that I've learned in physics, but the only unit I can think of right now would be the momentum and impulse unit, coincidentally one of my least favorite units. First of all, momentum is the equivalent of an object's mass times its velocity. So, if I wanted to find the momentum of my Mom's Nissan Ultima on

JesseLefler

JesseLefler

Dodgeball

Last year I was involved in the Dodge for Josh Dodgeball Tournament. This tournament raised money for the Josh Rojas Foundation. This event proved how physics can not only be fun but at times can also be painful. In the game of dodgeball the entire objective is to create and form collisions. In this sport there are two typees of collisions, inealastic and elastic. One can witness the collisions by watching a player get hit by a ball or when two balls collide into one another. IN an elastic colli

JesseLefler

JesseLefler

×
×
  • Create New...