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.