Oh Christmas Tree
Entry posted by TheSigFig
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Ah, the holidays: a time of cold weather, happy feelings, and peppermint flavored everything! What's not to love? with everyone getting their decorations up right around now i thought i'd talk about a simple thing with some simple physics to it: putting ornaments on a Christmas tree. If you get a real tree every year like me and my family do, then you probably run into the problem of trying to figure out what ornaments to put where because certain ones on certain branches will bend the branches, and cause the ornament to potentially fall off of the tree. Why does this happen? well that's because of torque that the weight of the ornament applies to the branch around it's rotational axis, which in this case is the trunk of the tree. if a branch bends too far when an ornament is placed, it simply means the branch has a lot of torque applied to it, and there are two ways to fix this. the first is to put a smaller ornament on that branch. this means less weight, and therefore less force applied. the other solution would be to move the ornament closer to the center of the tree. since torque is directly proportional to the distance which the force is applied, moving the ornament closer to the tree would decrease this distance, thus decreasing the torque
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