Physics in the car

I drove today!! For most people, especially seniors, this is a normal and most likely everyday occurrence. For me however, it is not. I have driven a grand total of three times in my entire life (including today). Once, in the quiet and mostly untraveled streets of kahala, another time in the kalani high school parking lot and today I drove on kalanianaole highway. It was super exciting and really scary, not only because it was only my third time ever driving, but also because I was driving with my friend, Andy in his dad's car. While I was driving, I looked into the side mirror thing and I noticed that there was a sticker that said "objects in mirror are closer than they appear." As we've learned earlier in the year, objects in mirrors are supposed to be the same distance in the mirror as they are in real life. The mirrors on the side of the cars however, are curved in a way that causes the images to appear closer than they are. These mirrors are convex and reflect the images towards the drivers eyes so that they are larger, causing our depth perception to register that they are closer with hopes of preventing accidents.

Shopping and Torque

This past weekend, I went to Walmart to get a midnight snack. Before I left my house, my mom asked me to pick up conditioner. When I got there, I purchased some Cheetoes, a few bottles of conditioner and a drink. My friend carried the bags to the car, so it wasn't until I got to my house that I realized the physics that can be found with shopping. When I was carrying the bags up the stairs to get into my house, I had a bag in my left hand containing the bag of Cheetoes and in my right hand, there was the bag holding the several bottles of conditioner along with my drink. The bag in my right hand was clearly much heavier than my midnight snack so right as I pulled the bags out of the car and started walking, I immediately felt my body lean to the left side to compensate for the extra weight (and additional torque) caused by the heavy bottles of conditioner in my right hand. The two grocery bags exerted a torque on my arms. As we learned in the seesaw lab, in order to balance the system, the two torques need to be equal. Because the two weights are not equal, the lever arm needs to increase on the side with the lighter bag, or more torque must increase on the lighter side so that the two sides cancel each other out and achieve equilibrium. Obviously, I cannot increase the length of my arms. My leaning towards the left however, increased the torque on the side with my Cheetoes and equaled the torque on the opposite side. Although I don't have a picture from Saturday night, here is a picture of the something similar to the seesaw lab. The fulcrum represents my body and the torque arm represents my arms. The force causing the torque were the two shopping bags.

Ancient Physics

This past week in school has been exhausting. When I'm tired, my brain is barely functioning properly so I sadly didn't notice any new concepts in physics this weekend. I did see something that was related one of the first concepts we learned; waves. On Saturday, I went to the Lil Wayne concert. Some people were doing the "wave." This can take place at many different events including sports games, concerts, etc. We learned about two kinds of waves at the beginning of the school year, transverse and longitudinal waves. When a crowd does the "wave," it is an example of a transverse wave. A transverse wave is a wave which moves from left to right as the objects (in this case, concert goers) move up and down. Although I did not notice anything we have been learning about recently, this weekend was a good refresher, reminding me about previous concepts.

Do Work

This past week, we've been learning about work in physics. Work is defined as the product of the force of an object and the distance through which the object is moved. The formula for work is work = force x distance. Work is measured in joules. So over the weekend, I tried looking for something related to the physics we've been learning about recently, but the only thing I can think of is a particular lack of physics that occurred. While I was at a birthday party, my friend Andy and I were leaving and he couldn't find his slippers. We think Gavin may have accidentally grabbed them by mistake, but anyway, I had to piggy back Andy to the car since it was raining all night and the ground was wet. After carrying him all the way down the street and around the corner to the car, I was super tired and out of breath but after I thought about, I sadly realized that I didn't do any work. Because the force used to lift Andy was perpendicular to the direction of the motion of me walking to the car, this was not considered work. The picture included is not a picture from this weekend but its a picture similar to the situation.

Newton's 3rd Law

This past summer, I visited Vietnam. We got to do a lot of new things but one of the really cool activities we did was visiting the Cu Chi Tunnels, a former military base during the Vietnam War. The tunnels now serve as a major tourist attraction where people can learn about the underground tunnels, built by the Viet Cong, buy war memorabilia including zippo lighters and dog tags of fallen American soldiers and even shoot various types of guns at a shooting range. Despite the fact that I look extremely weird in the picture, this is a picture of me shooting an AK 47. Newtons third law states that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. When I shot the gun, there was a strong kick or recoil. There was a worker assisting people and telling them where to stand and gun was mounted on the wall to prevent any serious injuries caused by the recoil. According to Newton's third law of motion, the force that I felt when the gun recoiled was equal to the force exerted on the bullet. The reason the bullet accelerates more than the gun however, is because the mass of the bullet is so much smaller. The greater mass of the gun on the other hand, results in a much lesser acceleration than the bullet.

simple physics

Although there was a lot of physics going on in the form of sports this weekend (soccer, wrestling, basketball, swimming, and diving), I decided to focus on a very simple type of physics that took place on Friday night. Earlier this weekend, my friends and I went to Senor Frogs. While I was looking over my pictures, I noticed that there was physics right at our table. As we sat down and ate, our bodies exerted a force on the bench. The bench exerted an equal and opposite force on us as we sat down. This demonstrates Newton's third law of motion; whenever one object exerts a force on a second object, the second object exerts and equal and opposite force on the first. Physics is in the most common places. In fact, you are probably experiencing Newtons third law right now.

Diving in with physics

On friday I watched my friend, Bridget's diving meet at school. It was the first time I ever watched on and it was quite interesting. I took some videos because I thought that there would be some kind of physics at the meet. I'm sure there's a ton of physics to diving but the only thing I can think of at the moment is that when the diver is diving into the water, gravity pulls down on the diver at 9.8 m/s. The different divers hit the water at different times however, due to other factors such as how high the are able to jump off the board, how many and what kind of turns they do.