CharlieEckert

Well i thought my last post was about the physics of pain pong(a painful variant of ping pong) was pretty crazy. Well a professor from Brigham Young University took it to a whole new extreme. Professor Harold Stokes used a cannon to launch a ping pong ball at himself at over 500 mile per hour. Now that's dedication to teaching!!!

So last night the swim team got together for some pizza and to hang out. Being highly intelligent teenagers, we decided to play some pain pong. For those of you who aren't familiar with pain pong, it is a variant of ping pong where everything you loose the point you turn around and your opponent smashes the ball with the paddle at your bare back. Naturally if your quite bad at ping pong(like me) the game can get very painful, but why? Well its because of physics, more specifically impulse! Δp= Ft The impulse or change in momentum is equal to the force applied multiplied by the time of the collision. In the case of ping pong ball hitting my back, the change in momentum is a constant. The force is inversely proportional to the time of the collision. Since the time it takes to stop the ball is quite short, it leads to a large applied force, thus the large welts on my back [ATTACH=CONFIG]602[/ATTACH]

^ doesn't seem to be true for Ryan Fitzpatrick. He went to Harvard so he probably can understand physics and yet he can't throw a football well.

Create your own letters that require less writing. Merge your letter together. Thats how I write and it require less work!!!!!

SwagDragon15 my post about swimming have definitely been better. Plus I've done like 8 on swimming. Midnightpanther your cousin net work is his change in gravitational potential energy from standing on the block to to where he finishes in the water.

ALWAYS type your blog posts in a word document and then copy and paste them here. It makes blogging so much less stressful.

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

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.

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.

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!!!!

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

Soapy bragging rights!!!

Recently physicists at the Ludwig-Maximilians University Munich and the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Germany have registered a temperature a “few billionths of a Kelvin” below absolute-zero. Now you’re probably thinking what??? If the Kelvin measurement of temperature is a measure of the energy of particles then how can we achieve a negative temperature and thus a negative energy? Furthermore if at Zero Kelvin particles stop moving how can you take energy from them? Well some scientists are now theorizing that the temperature scale is a loop with positive temperature on one half and negative on the other end. Zero Kelvin and Infinity separate the positive and negative. If temperature ‘exceed’ infinity or go ‘below’ zero, they end up in the negative loop. So how did physicists achieve this result? Well what they did cooled about 100,000 gas particles to a few nanokelvins in a vacuum chamber. At this extremely low temperature, the physicist than used a magnetic field to creating a stronger attraction force between the particles than the repulsions forces, resulting in a negative pressure. The negative temperature prevents the system from collapsing after a negative pressure is achieved. The end result was absolute temperature a few nanokelvins below zero. These negative temperature particles behaved exactly opposite of regular particles. The particles were more likely to occupy high energy level. Some physics also believe that the negative temperature has parallels with dark energy, the mysterious energy powering the expansion of the universe. It will be very interesting to see how the scientific community responds to this 'discovery'. Will we learn about it in college or will it be disproved. Here a link for any of you who want to read more about this very strange concept. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/04/absolute-zero-record-setting-negative-temperature_n_2404666.html

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.

So this morning I went out to warm up my car for practice, only to discover that my car door was frozen shut. Now I know what your thinking, why don’t you just pull harder, well I did but unfortunately the door handle was poorly designed. As shown in the picture below, one corner of the metal holding the handle on is detached. [ATTACH=CONFIG]568[/ATTACH] In order to open the door, the handle is pulled up and out at an angle. Under normal conditions, i.e., the door not being frozen shut the door handle functions just fine. However this morning I realized the flaw with the design. If there is ice on the door, a certain amount of force is required to break it. But because the handle lifts slightly up, the force I apply contains a component in the vertical direction that is entirely useless. This additional component tears at the metal until it breaks as shown in the picture above. I ended up giving up on getting my car door to open after realizing the handle would probably break before the ice would. Fortunately my sister was home from college so I borrowed/stole her car so I could go to practice

.785 seonds

So I was watching Ironclad and decided that I could use the movie to blog about physics stuff. The main character, Templar Knight Thomas Marshal was ridding around on his horse at Rochester castle, wailing his flair around, total bossing up those bad guys, when suddenly he is pulled off his horse. A huge crowd of bad guys form around him beating him with axes and hammers and stuff. Luckily our Templar Knight is tied to his stead who eventually/after an eternity, the horse decides it would be a good idea to drag his master back to safety. So I will be analyzing how much his amour protected him, since he later walks away with out so much as a broken bone. Now according to my precise calculations, Knight Marshal was left on the ground for a grand total of 10 seconds. I also estimate that he received three attacks per second that he was left defenses on the ground. This means that he received at least 30 strikes while lying on the ground. Now wiki answers informs me that the average human can exert a force of 680 Newton’s, but these bad guys weren’t average humans, they were Danish mercenaries. I will therefore estimate the force each one applied to be 1000 Newton’s. Considering it is now 12:20 right now and I don’t want to go out to my garage and measure the surface area of an axe and a sledge hammer, I will just estimate them!!! S.A. of Axe/slegehammer: .0005 m2 Since pressure = Force/ area, the pressure exerted by these goons with their primitive weapons is a whooping 2000kPa. This is equivalent to 290 Psi or Lbs per square inch. Once again, Wiki answers informs us that a human skull will crack under a mere 15 Psi. If we assume that the amour doesn’t damage with each hit (which we all know isn’t true), that must mean that Knight Marshal’s armor absorbs at a bare minimum of 95% of the pressure applied, which is just simply incredible. Multiple the 290 Psi by the 30 blows that Marshal suffers, and it seems far fetched that Marshal is still alive let alone able to continue to fight afterwards!!! Picture of our Templar Knight below!!! [ATTACH=CONFIG]562[/ATTACH] Time for Sleep!!!

Me want cookieee! .78 M from the pivot point!

Well I am sure that you are all familiar with the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) discovery of the Higgs boson, but it looks as if the LHC as made another discovery, this one accidental!!! After 2 million lead-proton collisions, the CMS team at the LHC discovered that several pairs of particles - that were created from the collision- flew away from each other with their respective directions being correlated. I am not a particles physicist so I have really no idea what this means or the significant of this, but physicists certainly found this surprising. “Somehow they fly at the same direction even though it's not clear how they can communicate their direction with one another. That has surprised many people, including us,” says MIT physics professor Gunther Roland Physicists have two theories on what this matter is, “The new type of matter, which has yet to be verified, is theorized to be one of two possible forms: Either “color-glass condensate” — a flattened nucleus transformed into a “wall” of gluons, which are smaller binding subatomic particles, or it could be “quark-gluon plasma,” a dense, soup or liquid-like collection of individual particles.” Both of these theories believe that this matter would be present at the inception of universe, moments after the big bang. I imagine scientists will attempt to replicate this finding to better their understanding of the beginning of our universe. Perhaps the most interesting thing is that fact that the team at the LHC were not searching or expecting for this discovery of new matter. They were caught with complete surprise from their findings. “It was supposed to be sort of a reference run — a run in which you can study background effects and then subtract them from the effects that you see in lead-lead collisions,” Gunther Roland http://www.rdmag.com/news/2012/11/cern-collider-may-have-produced-new-type-matter http://idealab.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/11/large-hadron-collider-may-have-produced-new-matter.php

don't get your hopes up of it happening soon. Construction could begin in 2015 or 2016 and will not be completed before 2026.- wikipedia

yes... Brandon its like your made up of only photon and gluon, you have no mass!

yes, it will be those who drive slowly and run out gas. they will then freeze without heat

well you may think slowing down is the smart move well i disagree. The reduced friction will make it more so your more likely to slide, which is fun, its like sledding. So ya on rainy and snowy days, I speed up!:einstein)

Your wall of text is making my eyes bleed!!

Your small frame should help in your quest for ultimate speed. What can also help would be to pack on the pounds while still minimizing your exposed Surface area should also help