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

Bottle Rockets Day 1

My partner and I started creating our bottle rocket. Our first trial had three wings, around the same size and position but not quite, and taped together at the top to try and trap air when it fell down. We went on the hope that the rocket would fall back down and the air that could be caught in the wings as a make shift parachute (at that time we didn't have a cone or a chute to work with). It didn't end up working. At all.

Our next design had four identical wings (taped in duct tape in case it rained) and had a rock taped to the top to balance the rocket out. We added a cone to the top (courtesy of Jasmine and her cone selling business) and folded up a plastic bag parachute inside of it. We also added another cup or so of water. The launch worked out well, just making five seconds.

--will add video later--

Power

Today we added onto our what we knew about work and learned about power.  Power is how much work you can do in how much time. In class we weighed two people and had them run up a flight of stairs while others timed them. A person with a high speed would have a large amount of power, or watts.


During class, Kimi and I were the ones to run. Because I was heavier then Kimi, it took me a little longer to run up the seventeen steps. But because our mass was different and our times relatively similar, I generated a higher power.

Unit 8: Work

In unit 8, we learned about work. Work is defined as the change in energy and can be found by multiplying net force and displacement. The unit for work is joules, or kgm/s. We learned how to calculate for gravitational potential energy (energy an object could have due to its position in a gravitational field) and kinetic energy (energy an object has while moving.) We also learned about spring potential energy. To be able to find spring potential energy, you must know the spring constant, or k.

When graphing on a force vs distance graph, the slope is k and the area under the curve is work done.

Unit 7: Momentum

The definition of momentum is the property of a moving body. Momentum is a vector quantity that can be found using the equation momentum (p)=mass x velocity. We also learned that, in an isolated system, momentum in has to equal momentum out

Impulse is the average force multiplied by the time of contact/the change in momentum.

In class, we talked about how when something runs into something, the total momentum is divided between the two. When it collides with a stationary object, a moving object will come to a halt and the stationary object, in theory would move at the same velocity the other did.

Eggdrop Lab

The idea behind our egg drop container was to have something that was small to reduce bouncing around inside the container, padded to hopefully prevent cracking from the impact when it landed, and light so it would reach maximum velocity relatively quickly. In our small air tight tupper ware container, we packed as much stuffing as would fit in order to cushion the egg. After sealing it tight, we taped spongey pieces of foam around the tupper ware to break the fall and extend the contact time.

The forces that were acting on the container were weight force down, normal force up when it lands, air resistance up.

Our egg was completely shattered. The problem probably was that since the container itself was too small and light, too much force was applied where there wasn't enough area that could take the force. Perhaps the container wasn't packed tightly enough and the egg rattled against the side. If we were to do the lab again, I'd probably layer containers to take more force before it reaches the egg container and create a cone as something to take majority of the force on the bottom.