For the fifth day of Blogmas, I will be discussing the physics of singing Christmas carols. When someone is singing, they emit sound waves. Because sound waves are mechanical waves, they are required to travel through a medium. When traveling through this medium, the particles vibrate creating a frequency which is measured in vibrations per second or hertz. In turn, the higher the frequency, the higher the pitch of the singer. The loudness or quietness of the singer is measured by the amplitude
A Christmas Story is an iconic Christmas movie, so today I decided to discuss the physics of one of its well known scenes. Ralphie's friend Flick is triple dog dared to stick his tongue to the pole by the kids in the school yard. Unfortunately, when he sticks his tongue to the pole, it gets stuck and the fire department must come to save him. The reason his tongue gets stuck is because the metal pole is a great conductor of heat. The thermal energy from your body is transferred into the pole fas
For day 3 of Blogmas, we are going to discuss the physics of Christmas lights. It is important to find Christmas lights wired in parallel because the set of lights will still work if one light blows. This way you will not go through the struggle of hanging all of your lights just for fail when you turn them on.Lights that do not work when one bulb breaks are wired in series. In series , electricity must flow from one bulb to the next. In a parallel, each light is on its own circuit to the power
For today's Blogmas, I thought it would be interesting to calculate the force inflicted upon an ornament when it falls off of a Christmas tree. I have a 7ft Christmas tree so I decided to calculate the force exerted on an 35g ornament from this height assuming the ornament is placed at the top of the tree. F=mg therefore the force of the ornament when it hits the ground is .343N. I thought it would also be interesting to calculate the power of the ornament as it is falling. Using conservation of
For the first day of blogmas I decided it would be interesting to calculate how many reindeer it would take to carry Santa's load of toys. First, I found that there are approximately 2 billion children in the world (people under the age of 18). The average reindeer can pull about 136 kg and we can assume that children receive an average of 5kgs worth of gifts. Using this information, if can be found that Santa will need approximately 73.5 million reindeer to help him deliver his presents.
