Final Post

Physics is the study of matter, force and energy. Overall, I thought the class was pretty fun, but chaotic. Which basically means fun. Some lessons were kind of hard to follow but in the end there were super easy parts which made things even out for me.

I learned that I cannot draw a straight line. I also learned how deficient I am with a calculator and how bad I am keeping up with nightly homework assignments. I also learned about hot light reflects off of things no matter what the surface. I also managed to pick up little tidbits that I go off reciting, confusing my friends who were in English and angering my friends who also took Physics.

I liked that the class and course overall was so spontaneous. One moment we could be studying and the next be banging on an Inception noise button confusing the surrounding classes. It was nice to take a summer class that actually made it feel like summer even if we were at school.

As for feed back, it was fun, but honestly I couldn't stand a single one of our quarter projects. Except for maybe quarter one. Other than that, the egg drop lab didn't seem relevant, the bottle rocket was hard to test because of conflicting variables like wind, and the song one was just parodying a song using big vocab words that are nearly impossible to rhyme with anything.

--will update with pictures for the last few posts--

Unit 10: Continued

Refraction is the changing of direction and speed of a wave due to medium. The index of refraction is found by dividing the speed of light in a vacuum by the speed of light in the medium. The larger the index of refraction is, the slower light moves through the object.

When going from a fast medium to a slow medium, the light will bend towards the normal, or the perpendicular intersect of the surface the light is entering.

Converging lenses are like goggles. They make light converge further up then it normally would. In water, the index number is higher then it would be in air so the light would have to go further before it intersects. To focus that light, people wear goggles if they want to see under water. Diverging lenses make light spread out.

--will update with pictures for the last few posts--

Unit 10(?): Colors

Growing up, we always knew that red, blue and yellow were the primary colors because, between them, you could make almost any color. In light, the principle is similar but the colors are different. The primary colors of light are red, green, and blue, yellow instead being the product of red and green. The product of green and blue was a color called cyan while the mix between red and blue was magenta. These six colors make up a wheel that starts from red and goes to magenta, blue, cyan, green, and yellow back around again. The color opposite from one of the colors on the wheel is said color's complimentary color.

Unit 9: Electromagnetic waves

We learned that light moves in a straight line and at the velocity of 3 x 10^8 m/s. That means in one second, light can go to the moon and back. It also means that, in the same amount of time, light can go around the world 7 1/2 times. We learned about the concept of transparent and opaque. Transparent material lets certain waves through while opaque blocks majority (all visible light) all together. Like how an x-ray can see through your skin and muscle but your bones show up; your skin and muscle is transparent to the x-rays even though your bones are not.

Unit 9: Sound waves

Today we played with a bunch of beakers and tuning forks. We learned the idea of resonance which is an increase in amplitude of a wave by vibration caused by a force at the same frequency.  To go along with this idea, Mr. Blake showed us a video of the Takoma bridge from forty or fifty years ago. Along with resonance we learned about both reflection, or an amount of light, heat, or sound that is thrown back in such a way, and refraction, the bending of light, when light moves from one medium into another; change in the direction of waves as they pass from one medium to another; bending of the path of waves accompanied by a change in speed in wavelength of the waves.

Unit 9: Waves

Unit 9 was about waves. To find the velocity of a wave you need to multiply the wavelength by the frequency of the wave. The period of a wave = 1/frequency. We learned about what the parts of a wave were called: crest, (the top half of a wave), trough (the bottom half) and the nodes (the equilibrium point between waves). Amplitudes are the distance from the very top/bottom part of the crest/trough to the closest point on the equilibrium line thing.
Because the idea behind waves is usually energy opposed to a solid object, waves either add to each other or subtract each other for the split second that they pass depending on which way it was moving and how big it was before the collision before passing on.

I hate my laptop

Today, we tried to launch our rocket. Without altering anything, we went outside to get a feel as to how we should fix our rocket. But even though yesterday our rocket was able to stay in the air for five seconds, this one wouldn't. We ended up adding four more cardboard fins to the very top of the rocket and elongating it with the plastic of an extra bottle we had. Instead of using the grocery bag parachute we tried using the day before, we switched it for a garbage bag and tied it down with extra strings.



In the end, our rocket didn't manage to stay up in the air. Our longest time was 5.3 seconds. I think its because our rocket wasn't long enough and as a result couldn't get high enough in the air to reach the minimum required for our parachute to come out consistently.

I really don't think I learned anything from this lab except for that I like it a lot less then the egg lab. It caused a lot more stress and in the end results were really varried even when we kept things the same