Acceleration due to gravity news

[Guest Cdorren]

This just in!!! A young physicist of only 17 years old has just calculated the acceleration due to gravity on planet earth. In Irondequoit high school in Rochester New York a group of mere students proved the age old physics fact. Blind faith couldn’t satiate their thirst for knowledge. Armed with a ball, tape measurer, and stop watch these physics fighters set out with a mission: find gravity’s acceleration. Excuse me, I’m receiving their procedure now……It looks as if they had one person start with the ball at a fixed point and then the same person let go of the ball and measured the time it took for the ball to go from the point to the floor. This was done with a stop watch. They repeated this procedure three times. Knowing that the initial velocity was 0 they then proceeded to calculate the acceleration due to gravity using the formula d= vit+ 1/2at^2. This came out to be 13.29 m/s^2. There was a bit of error in their calculation due to the equipment they possessed. They also calculated their percent error and found that it was 35.474 percent. This was most likely due to the variation in their three measurements. Regardless of the variation this was a great discovery in Mr. Fullerton’s class as well as a great confirmation in the world of physics

-Jamie D

[Guest xcrunner92]

Breaking new from Irondequoit High School Mr. Fullertons physics class just confirmed the age old discovery that acceleration due to gravity is 9.81m/s squared. They did this by drooping a dodge ball from a selected height and then finding the mean. From that number they were able to calculate the acceleration due to gravity from the equation d=vit+1/2atsquared which resulted in the answer of 11.4m/s squared. They then calculated there percent of error which resulted to be 16 percent which is actually quite low given that they only used stop watches. It truly is amazing what kids are able to do with such basic tools.