CVs Blog

Whether you notice it or not, there are fundamental concepts of physics on your way to the grocery store. For one thing, in an average car ride all three types of acceleration happen: acceleration, deceleration, and turning. Another thing, riding fast in a car helps me to understand concepts of inertia. When I was little, we would be traveling 50 mph down the highway, and I would throw a tennis ball in the air. The tennis ball moved with the car. I asked my dad why the ball didn't go flying to the back of the car. That was the moment I learned about the concept of inertia. Lastly, on highway 104, there is a very large round about turn. Every time we make this right turn, I feel as though I will fly to the left side of this car. Knowing physics, I now know that inertia is what makes my body feel that way, and the centripetal force of friction keeps me from doing so. I could even calculate the force felt by f=mv^2/r. 

Today in physics class we did a little something special; a fun activity investigating several crimes. Whether these crimes were really in the local area, or a figment of imagination, it was still interesting to pick them apart to find out the culprit. The first crime scene was a murder, murder by gun. We had to decide which gun did the killing and based on small pieces of evidence, and by knowing this gun we could match it up with certain people. We knew the initial height of the bullet (the exit wound) to be the height of the victims shoulder, and the final height the height of the hole in the wall. Using this displacement, the acceleration due to gravity, and the fact that the bullet traveled horizontally, the time could be found. Finally, using this time and horizontal displacement, we discover a velocity 30% as strong as the velocity fired, and the pieces match up.

Secondly, a body was found dead at the bottom of a hotel after Alonzo Green supposedly tried to jump to the swimming pool. We have to decide if he jumped, or was pushed. Once again, using kinematics we can find the time it takes for a person to fall the given height. The given height could be measured with a diagram and a conversion scale from cm to meters. Once we have this time, we are given  the max velocity of a 45 year old male sprinting to be 6.9 m/s, and this velocity will leave a person 2 meters short of the pool, exactly what Alonzo was. He jumped.

Lastly, Evelyn Horton drove her car off a bridge when she supposedly was sabotaged by a raging driver. However, she may be just saying this to avoid embarrassment, and so we want to know which is true before moving in to a long term investigation. Once again, kinematics are used to find the time it takes the car to fall a certain distance, and therefore allow us to find the initial velocity when hitting and breaking the rail. Horton claimed that she decelerated at least 8.83 m/s/s before hitting the rail, however, with her given initial velocity, her final velocity with this acceleration would be to slow to make it as far as she did, therefore she snoozed. 

All in all, this was a fun activity that put a spin on our daily routine in APC, and the extra credit definitely made it competitive and fun  

In this blog I have finally decided to dwell on the much ignored physics of movies, specifically superhero movies. And while many of these movies ignore laws of physics for good reasons (some movies would be unbelievably boring if they did),it is still worth it to knit pick the physics of a great superhero. I am going to focus on the movie X-Men: Days of Future Past and I will focus on a certain scene with a certainly remarkable character: Quicksilver. This hero is a super speedster that can run up to speeds well over the speed of sound, and this remarkable scene implies Quicksilver to the most powerful superhero. Here's the physics on why.

In the scene, everything slows down dramatically, while Quicksilver moves at a normal speed, and using his frame of reference, I calculated just how fast he was going. In the scene I timed a watched a bullet fired by a revolver to travel approximately 1 cm in 3 seconds with respect to Quicksilver's frame of reference. Assuming the revolver to be an average pistol, we can say that it's speed was around 400 mph, or 178.8 m/s with respect to real time. Now if the bullets travel about 0.0033 m/s in Quicksilver's frame of reference and they were really traveling 178.8 m/s, this means that Quicksilver's frame of reference is 53,640 times slower than the average person's. Furthermore, if we say that the fastest Quicksilver traveled in the video was about 15 m/s, his actual speed was 804,600 m/s (2366 times the speed of sound or Mach 2366)! Now lets talk about the implied powers with this speed. First off, Quicksilver's legs are incredibly strong, because legs apply the force to the ground that accelerate the body. If he accelerates to top speed at a .01 of a second, his acceleration is 80,460,00 m/s/s, meaning a force applied of of at least 80 million Newton's. Secondly, any touch from Quicksilver could be fatal. If he touches and moves a person's head even 1cm, the change in momentum on that time interval (say .001s and a mass of 5kg) would be 50 m/s(kg), and because impulse is the change in momentum, the force applied would be 50,000 N! That is a huge force, a concussion to the head to say the least; now just imagine if he punched a person at top speed! Lastly, the fact that Quicksilver's mind can perceive and comprehend the world 53,640 times as fast as we can shows just how powerful his mind has to be. Not only is a physical specimen, but we can imply he's intellectual superior by this fact.     

Now we know he is powerful, but now it's time for me to rant about why just about all of this is impossible. First off, lets talk about that fun thing called friction. Because Quicksilver accelerates so quickly, there would be a crazy amount of frictional force applied to his feet. At the speeds he is going, his shoes should probably wear off and burn to fire, but that what not be too convenient for our hero. There is also friction in the air called drag force. This force becomes greater at higher speeds, and if you want proof for that, stick your hand out the window of a car when going 10 mph vs 100 mph  . One can imagine the air resistance Quicksilver experiences when accelerating and decelerating to these top speeds of 800,000 m/s. His clothes would probably blow right off, and luckily the directors ignored that too. Thirdly, there is a point in the scene when Quicksilver throws a plate, and in mid air it slows down to the speeds of all the other objects (as if it was thrown at Quicksilver's frame of reference, but traveled at real time). Any Physics student knows that by Newton's 1st law a body in motion tends to stay in motion, not decelerate at 80 million m/s/s! Lastly, the entire scene, Quicksilver listen's to Jim Croce's "Time in a Bottle" on a Sony Walkman, and even if we ignore all the sonic booms Quicksilver creates, one would have to understand that the song would have to be playing 53,640 times as fast as normal. If we assume the average angular speed of the tape on a Walkman to be 33.3 RPM, it would have to be traveling at about 2 million RPM for Quicksilver to listen, and maybe the 1970's gadget can handle that speed, but I wouldn't count on it. 

Anyway, if you have made it this far in reading my blog, thank you and congratulation, you made it through a movie rant! Now this scene is one of my all-time favorites, so click below and enjoy  

Everyone loves going to the amusement park; a local favorite is seabreeze. When we are little, we enjoy the ride, and have a good time. However, as I have grown more and more into my physics career, going to the amusement park is not quite that simple for there is physics all around the park. In fact, if it weren't for human accomplishments in physics, there would be no park! 

       The first ride I thought about this was the musical express. On this ride, people sit in carts on a circle and the entire ride rotates over and over again, until the ride is going a very fast velocity. One of the warnings of the ride is for smaller passengers to sit on the inside. Why is this? Cause the smaller passenger would get squashed! There is a centripetal force with this ride, based on the equation a=v^2/r. The ride gets to a point so fast that the friction of the seat is overcome and th people squish together!

    Secondly the Jack Rabbit is a classic example of conservation of energy (kinda). Based on the conservation of energy, when the ride is at its highest point, the potential energy will be converted into kinetic energy, and therefore the ride cannot reach a higher point without being acted on by an outside force. Unfortunately the world is imperfect and there are outside forces, like friction! The Jackrabbit has three humps, and each hump is lower than the prior, this is because friction steals energy, and therefore it cannot reach a higher point. All in all, physics makes our lives a little bit more complicated because we can no longer enjoy the ride without thinking.

On Friday the 16th in AP Physics C class, Mr. Fullerton assigned us a lab with a very simple task: shoot a ball to hit a book, if it hits the book the whole class passes, if it misses the whole class fails. Although the task seems simple, there were multiple layers to this problem, clearly with high stakes. Through this lab we were to use our skills of kinematics to determine the velocity that the instrument shoots the ball at, and then use this information to place the book at the correct location. Furthermore, we were asked to work as a class really testing out communications skills. The 22 kids in this class are some of the brightest in the school, yet our communication is where we failed. 

While we should of broken up works into different groups, the whole class was all over he place sound different things, and using different values. Personally for me, my problem was trying to find the exact time of the first trial, and this prevented me from having a sufficient amount of time to do the math. Also, a problem we had when calculating the distance was using the displacement direction as a negative and the acceleration as a positive. Because the vertical displacement of he ball and the acceleration due to gravity are in the same direction, there signs should be the same. This was a vector analysis that further screwed up our final values. After making this change in the math, I was able to find the true velocity of the ball (using the equation d=(1/2)at^2+vt). With this information I could then find the distance the ball should travel with instrument set to a new angle of -4°. Using a two step kinematics problem (work attached), I was able to find the new displacement to be 1.92m in the x-direction. This value is very accurate to the actual loctation of the second firing, and if we had fixed these probaes we would not have failed. 

The simple truth of it is that we did fail, as at the end of the period we were pressed with time and placed the book at a pretty random  eye-balled location. It's ok for us to fail because if we analyze our failure we can learn and then chances our, we will do it right the next time!

I am a senior at IHS ready to finish my high school career off strong. Some things I am interested in are basketball, football, music, tennis, and of course, physics. I am one of six kids, and right in the middle. In school I am strong in math and science classes because it comes naturally to me, but also because I enjoy the curriculum. In the future I plan on going to college and majoring in engineering (not sure which field specifically yet). 

  I'm taking AP Physics C this year because I was introduced to the topic last year in AP Physics and it instantly appealed to me. I understood the concepts and the math, but most of all the stuff was really cool! This year I hope to get as much and more out of this physics class. I am excited to learn more about how and why things happens in the world, and hopefully do some cool labs. I am anxious about the fact that this course will be extremely challenging in comparison to all other classes I've taken this far. Also the fact that I must push to keep myself at a good pace and do the work myself; I no longer will have the training wheels like other classes I've taken before. All in all, this class will be fun yet difficult, yet it will all be good because this will be the closest I've come to taking a college level class thus far.