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CharlieEckert

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Blog Entries posted by CharlieEckert

  1. CharlieEckert
    As I talked about in my last post, drag force is a huge factor in limiting performace in the pool. So how can we combat this problem?
    Well for dedicated swimmers, shaving can make the difference. Since many races come down to fractions of seconds, any hair you can cut off can mean the difference bewteen first and second! Optimizing the distance you travel in the air when you dive of the block can make or break a race. As stated in my blog post, water is over 700 times denser and will offer far more reistance. Therefore the farther you can travel in the air, the more time you can cut off!
  2. CharlieEckert
    I found the most amazing video of superconductor levitating from a magnetic field. You absolutely have to watch this video!!! So basically a sapphire is coated with yttrium barium copper oxide. When cooled to -301oF, the saphire becomes a superconductor. The superconductor experiences no electrical resistance. For some reason the magnetic fields aren't able to penetrate because the superconductor expels fields from the inside. This leads to something called quantum locking which holds the superconductor in place. This is a quantum mechanism so its a bit beyond our knowledge of physics to understand, but none the less, its really awesome!!!


  3. CharlieEckert
    Ever heard of the Superconducting Super Collider before? I certainly hadn't.

    In 1983, plans for the Superconducting Super Collider were being developed by the U.S. Department of Energy. Its planned ring circumference was 87.1 kilometers with an energy of 20 TeV per beam of protons – numbers that surpasses those of the now operational Large Hadron Collider by a factor of three (27 kilometer with an energy of 7TeV per beam). The project initial goal was to detect the Higgs Boson. The project began construction in 1991 with a budget of $4.4 billion. In 1993 the project was scrapped when cost projection rose to $12 billion.

    It's Interesting to think about what would be different if this project had been completed. The Higgs Boson would have likely been discovered years ago Since the SSC had a head start on the LHC by several years. In addition, the SSC could harness almost three times more energy lending more potential for discoveries.

    Instead of contributing to science and our understanding of the universe, the SSC sits abandoned with 22.5 km of tunnel and 2.2 billion dollars spent on it before the project was cut.
    http://www.amusingplanet.com/2010/12/abandoned-remains-of-superconducting.html
  4. CharlieEckert
    So I read something really interesting about a particle called the “Oh-My-God particle”. Detected on October 15th, 1991 the particle was a proton that was traveling at nearly the speed of light. In fact it was traveling at 99.99999999999999999999951% of the speed of light. The proton had the energy equivalent of a baseball traveling about 100 kilometers per hour (imagine getting hit in the head and knocked out by a particle too small to see). Even the particles produced in our particles accelerators don’t come close to the energy of this particle; the proton has 40 million times more energy than the highest energy proton produced in a particle accelerator. Particles like this one has been detected multiple times since, but physicists don’t really know where it came from or what accelerated it. Wikipedia said something about spinning super massive black holes and possibly dark matter being the cause, but it quickly got too complicated for me to follow. Anyways I found this really interesting so I thought I would share it!
  5. CharlieEckert
    The Physics of how i time traveled into the Future and therefore these blogs posts aren't really late technically kinda probably.

    Well um these blogs posts were due last night, which I didn't realize, also i thought they were just extra credit. So Ill discuss how I could have potentially traveled into the future which caused me to submit these late.
    As we learned last year E = mC^2. As the speed of a particle increases in speed, the mass increases. But while the mass increases, time will actually slow down to prevent a particle from exceeding the speed of light. Basically this means that if I had been traveling at near the speed of light this weekend my watch could tell me that's its still Saturday because time had progressed more slowly for me. I also could have spent the weekend indulging in my favorite pastime: orbiting a Super Massive Black Hole!!!

    What happens is that space-time will bend because of differences in gravity and velocity. Both of those examples would result in me traveling forward in time and missing the deadline!
  6. CharlieEckert
    The physics of hypothetically cheating at swim practice. During Saturday practices, our coach has us do stations. One of these stations involves sprinting with a parachute.
    As you can see the parachute is quite small but despite this, it still creates a whole lot of drag. The parachute is very thin and creates a large pocket that water gets trapped into. As the parachute is pulled through the water, the water getting caught in the pocket creates drag. Now 100% hypothetically speaking if anyone were to be feeling lazy and tired at 7 am on Saturday and wanted to reduce how much work they have to put in, it is postulated, supposed, and imagined they could potentially hypothetically theoretically tie the parachute in a knot. Doing this prevent the parachute from opening up, minimizing its surface area catching water. The drag experienced would be just a fraction of the previous drag. Devin don’t tell Brian about this blog, OR ELSE!!!!
  7. CharlieEckert
    So at yesterdays practice my coach made us take out the lane lines and put them on the reel after practice. As we spin the reel, the reel becomes increasing difficult to spin because the additional mass of the lane lines.
    I decided it would be a great blog post to find out how much the moment of inertia changes for the reel once all of the lane lines are put on. I’m going to make some rough estimates on the dimensions of the reel since I couldn’t find them online and I can’t go in and measure them right now. I’m going to assume the rod going through the middle of the reel is .1m in radius and the radius of the when the reel is full, the maximum radius of the lane lines to the rotating axis is .75m. Now the reel is really light and spins easily when empty so I’m going to just assume that the moment of inertia is zero initially. The moment of inertia of a Cylinder with a hole in the middle is (1/2)M(a2+b2) where a and b and the radiuses of the cylinder. The mass of each lane line is 33.1 kg and there are 7 lane lines for a total mass of about 232 kg. Therefore the moment of inertia is (1/2)(232)(.12+.752) or 66.4 kg*m2. No wonder my arms hurt so much after spinning the reel.
  8. CharlieEckert
    The physics of Swim Paddles. Some times at swim practice our coach makes us use these paddles.
    These paddles typicality increase how far we go with each stroke while slowing down our stroke as it takes more force to pull. This because with the paddles, our hands have a greater surface area. When we pull our arms through the water, we pull more water behind us. Based on the law of conservation of momentum, if I catch and push more water at the same velocity backwards I will have a greater velocity forward. However pulling more water takes more force causing us to slow down our recovery part of the stroke to compensate for the extra work, so overall we swim at close to the same speed. After using the paddles, our arms and shoulders are always more sore. When we’re feeling lazy, we will grab the smaller paddles because its less work for us. Yah Physics
  9. CharlieEckert
    The physics of the Powertower. So as previously mentioned in another blog, on the Saturday practices we do stations. One of the stations is doing sprints with THE POWERTOWER. What’s a Powertower you ask? Well if you have ever been to the pool and seen those giant red buckets attached to the metal frame thingy, that’s the Powertower. I’ve included a picture because I’m guessing none of you know what I’m talking about.
    [ATTACH=CONFIG]583[/ATTACH]

    Anyways we fill the buckets with water and a belt is hooked up to a pulley system so when we swim with the belt on, we lift the bucket. The station we do involves us sprinting 10.5 yards for time while pulling the weight of the bucket. We have a time range that we are supposed to be in and if we are under the range, we increase the weight.

    So initially I wanted to try to calculate a reasonable power ratio for myself while on the Powertower station. Unfortunately I underestimated the complexity of doing this. Even if I neglect the fact that the string has mass, the pulley has mass and the pulley system has friction (the pulley system is fairly complex and probably has a fair amount of friction) I still wouldn’t be able calculate my power. I would need my acceleration off the wall and my drag force experienced at my max velocity. The acceleration I figured I could estimate, but I realized that I couldn’t accurately calculate my drag force which I needed to find the average force I applied during my swim.
    Then I realized I could just calculate the power through the power tower alone which is far simpler and actually realistic to calculate. I swam 10.5 yards in 5.9 seconds while carrying 65 pounds. This is equivalent to 9.6 m and 289.13 newtons. Because of the pulley system the bucket doesn’t raise it self by 1 meter for each meter I swim forward. Instead swimming 9.6m only lifts the bucket .8m. The force used to lift the bucket is the weight of the bucket + mass*acceleration. Using kinematics, I calculate the acceleration to be .0459 m/s2 and thus the net force to be 1.36 Newtons. The total force is therefore 290.5. Since Power is Force * Distance / time, the Power ratio is 290.5 Newtons * .8 m / 5.9 seconds = 39.4 watts. Just to put this in perspective, a typical light bulb’s power ratio is around 60 watts (I think). Although my actual power rating would be much higher, the power through the power tower is just a small fraction of my power ratio.
  10. CharlieEckert
    Have you ever wondered if physics would be applicable to your life? How can you make what you learned in physics useful? Well Physicist Dmitri Krioukov used physics to get out of paying a $400 traffic ticket. Dmitri Krioukov wrote a paper titled "The Proof of Innocence" to explain to the judge that his traffic violation for running a stop sign was the result of the officer suffering from an optical illusion. The end result, Mr Krioukov no longer has to pay the ticket!! This proves one of two things, knowing physics can prove your innocence, or if make up a bunch of complicated stuff, someone who isn’t proficient in that field will believe it!
    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/16/dmitri-krioukov-physicist_n_1429545.html
  11. CharlieEckert

    Thermodynamics

    By CharlieEckert,

    Has your hand ever been so cold that it went numb? Well how about when it was 90o and you were outside in the sun, no, well this has happened to me before. Over the summer I worked part time at clover home leisure. Part of my job was to fill up propane tanks. Normally not a big deal, but sometimes we get massive propane tanks with purge valves. While filling, the purge valve forces the air out. When tank is done filling, the purge value starts spitting out massive amounts of propane. Propane stored in the tanks is very very cold to allow more gas to be stored. So I have to reach my hand into the cloud of propane gas and twist the purge valve shut as it is spitting out the ice cold propane(frost will literally form on the tank while I shut the value) . So one day a guy came in with 14 of these purge tanks. By the time I had finished filling the tanks my hand had been frozen and thawed and refrozen and rethawed far too many times. So my story kinda got away from me so I should probably relate this to physics. Thermodynamics was included in our physics class last year and as we learned PV=nRT. From this equation we get that n, the number of moles or amount of gas is inversely proportional to the temperature. If we want to put as much gas into the tank as possible we have three options, cool the gas down, make stronger tanks that can withstand more pressure, or alter the fabrics of the universe so that the gas constant R is a smaller value. Naturally cooling the gas is the most wildly used method (altho for my hand’s sake I’d prefer if we invested in the third option). Thus this is the reason why the propane gas is so cold when stored in a fuel tank.
  12. CharlieEckert

    This quater

    By CharlieEckert,

    Reiterating Dave's recent blog post, I thought I would review what this last quarter has been like. So this quarter covered the E&M portion of the Physics C course. My general opinion is that the jump from Physics B to Physics C was far easier for mechanics than the jump for E&M. From the first two exams I learned that I was horrendously bad at the E&M free responses. I also found while taking the test, I would realize that I didn't really understand the material as well as I thought. However it seems that with the last two units, I've done better. With the practice free responses, I actually was able to get the majority of the points for the problem where as before I was getting a dismal amount of points. The last two tests, I actually felt like I understood the material and wasn't as stressed during the test. Hopefully the rest of E&M goes like the 2nd half of this quarter and not the first half.
  13. CharlieEckert
    Engineering researchers at the University of Michigan have crated a nanoscale coating that is super effective at repelling liquids. The major difference between this coating and other coating is that with other coatings, liquids with very low surface tensions such as oils, alcohols, and organic acids stick to the coating and eventually diffuse through the coating; however with this coating, even liquids with low surface tensions are repelled. After testing well over a 100 liquids, the team at Michigan University found only two liquids capable of penetrating the coating which were chlorofluorocarbons. The coating consists of between 95 to 99 % air pockets. This prevents the liquids from coming close to the solid surface thus reducing the intermolecular forces that would attract the liquid to the solid. The liquid droplets failing to interact with the solid retain a spherical shape and bounce right off the coating.
    http://www.ns.umich.edu/new/multimedia/videos/21099-a-material-that-most-liquids-won-t-wet
  14. CharlieEckert
    So I figured I’d, write about why our water bottle rocket failed so miserably on arts fest. Our goal was to use parachutes that would cause our rocket to slowly descend to the ground. Instead of using just one, we figured using two would slow our rockets fall even more. In theory this would have worked fine, however when our rocket reached its maximum height and the nose cone fell off exposing the parachutes, instead of fully opening, the two chutes tangled together and didn’t fully open. The unopened parachutes did very little too slow the decent, causing the rocket to fall very quickly back to the ground. Perhaps sticking to one parachute, or attaching the string of the second parachute to the top of the other would have been a better plan.
  15. CharlieEckert
    Let’s say we have a person with a mass of 100 kg who can run at 5 m/s.
    Now we can make use of Einstein famous equation of E = MC2 :einstein)
    When the person is at rest, the total energy of the person is 100 * (3x108)2 or 9x1018 J
    When the person is running, their Kinetic energy can be defined as ½mv2
    Ke = (½)*(100)* 52
    Ke = 1250 J
    Therefore the person total energy is (9x1018 + 1250)J
    With a little reworking of the equation, we can get Δ m = (Ef – Eo) / (C2)
    Δ m = (1250 J / 9x1018 m2/s2)
    Therefore Δ m = 1.3888x10-16 kg
    This means the person running has gained mass (even if very small) and therefore Weight.
  16. CharlieEckert
    The Mag lab near Tallahassee has created a 45 Tesla Magnet. This Magnet is 800,000 more powerful than the earth magnetic field. The Magnet was build by placing a coil of wire inside a coil of wire inside a coil of wire ... creating a massive magnetic field. The Magnet proved so strong that a camera crew lost half its recordings just by being in the same building as the magnet.


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