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jwdiehl88

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Blog Entries posted by jwdiehl88

  1. jwdiehl88
    Since I was watching football (Go Bills!), I was thinking about the forces acting upon a football in the air.  Newton's laws help dictate the pattern of all moving objects, including footballs.  The path of a football's flight is not random, it is the result of the physical forces of inertia, air resistance, and gravity.  Newtons first law of motion states that an object in motion will stay in motion unless acted upon by an outside force.  A football travels in a parabolic path because of outside forces like air resistance to keep the ball from traveling in a straight line.
    Newton's second law states that the total change of an objects motion is equal to the sum of all forces acting on that object. As a football flies through the air the forces acting on it are constantly changing, except gravity. As the quarterback releases the ball, inertia is the greatest force acting on it.  As the football reaches its highest point, inertia weakens due to air resistance.  Then gravity takes over and pulls the ball back towards the earth.
     
     
  2. jwdiehl88

    Time Travel

    By jwdiehl88,

    Is time travelling even possible? Maybe, but to time travel a person has to be faster then light which is impossible because no one has enough energy to move faster than that speed.  However, Einstein’s special theory of relativity, developed in 1905, shows that time passes at different rates for people who are moving relative to one another - although the effect only becomes large when you get close to the speed of light.  If anyone has seen the TV show, the "Flash," the Flash is able to run at incredible speed.  He is relatively faster when a person watches him.  But in his own body he is running normally while everything else in the background is a blur.  Relative to him running at a speed close to light, his perception of fast is different to a person that is much slower than the speed of light.  But there may be an out to be found in general relativity, there are a possibility of wormholes – a kind of tunnel through space-time connecting otherwise very distant parts of the universe.f the “mouths” of the wormhole are moving relative to one another, then traversing the bridge between different points in space would also take a traveler to a different point in time to that in which she started.  The Flash is fast enough that he creates his own wormhole where he is able to travel between worlds and time itself.  
  3. jwdiehl88

    Washing Machine

    By jwdiehl88,

    Ten months from now, I have to do my own wash, so my parents are making me practice now.  Anyways, while I was doing my wash, I realized there is physics behind the washing machine rotating the the clothes around.  I realized that someone could calculate the centripetal force of the machine.  A person would have to mass the washing machine, then a person would have to measure the radius of the machine.  Then to find the velocity of you would use kinematics.  First you know the amount of time of the washer machine because you can set it up.  Then a person could calculate the rotational distance.  Measure how long it takes for one revolution.  Then with the rotational distance, it could be translate it to translation distance, with the radius known.  Then the person could find the velocity of the machine.  With that, the centripetal force could be found with mass times velocity^2 divided by the radius.  
     

     
  4. jwdiehl88

    Wi-fi

    By jwdiehl88,

    What is wi-fi? I used it all the time, but never really knew what it was. Wi-fi uses radio waves and sends out these waves to different devices to give them the power of the internet.  They send out around 2.2GHz - 2.4 GHz, These waves have similar frequencies as mircowaves.  These waves travel through the air, undetectable by the blind eye and they send out "information" to other devices.  The reason why people lose connection to their wi-fi after traveling some distance is that waves can only travel a certain distance.  Also the reason why wi-fi can be slow is because they can be blocked by interference by other waves crossing them. Additionally, there are certain amount of waves available, so the more devices connected on the wi-fi, the slow the connection will be.  
  5. jwdiehl88

    Yo-Yos

    By jwdiehl88,

    When I was a kid, my parents bought me a yo-yo. At first I was puzzled and wondered how to play with it. I spent a good amount of time practicing and I could finally make it roll and then come back to me. I thought that was a huge accomplishment, but then I saw on TV a yo-yo contest with these people doing insane tricks with their yo-yo. I never knew how they could do it. So I decided to see the physics behind a yo-yo.  I found that when people do string tricks that makes the yo-yo roll on the string is due to friction.  There is friction between the string and the axle that prevents the yo-yo from spinning, allowing the yo-yo to roll on its own string and not giving out more string.  This may seem simple but it applies to an yo-yo. Newtons first law that says that an object will stay in motion until an outside force is acted upon it. This is why a yo-yo comes back to your hand. You can flick your wrist and cause a force that push the yo-yo from its string and then you flick your wrist back to get the yo-yo back to its original state. 

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