Last But Not Least

Writing this last blogpost is somewhat bittersweet... or just sweet. I'm not gonna lie, I won't miss writing these every night. As interesting as physics turned out to be, I'm really looking forward to waking up at noon and not retaining any information whatsoever.

Physics is an explanation. It's why the sky is blue, and why rainbows exist. It's how we stay on planet Earth and don't float off into space. It's how we can send rockets into the atmosphere, and why waving goodbye isn't really a wave. That's what I've decided, anyway. And according to Moodle, it's also the branch of science dealing with the study of matter and energy, used to explore motion, forces, momentum, energy, waves, and optics.

The class turned out to be pretty fun. I'm definitely happy I chose to take this over the summer, since I think that my understanding of physics benefited from being the only subject I had to focus on. As exhausting as 4-6 hour class can be, for the most part the hours went by quickly, since we always had a lot to do to keep our minds occupied.

I learned a lot of things which will probably be of no use to me other than being interesting facts to spout off when needed. At the very least, it's stuff I find interesting, so not a total waste of a summer. These last few days of class have been the most interesting to me, like finding out how we see color, or how glasses keep me from being blind. I've also learned that I don't hate math as much as I thought I did. When used like this, where we can just put numbers into an equation without doing too much thinking, I even find math tolerable.

One thing that I think would make the class even better would be having more breaks. I'm not just saying this to get out of class time, I just honestly feel like it's easier to pay attention with a couple more breaks. They don't need to be particularly long, but maybe an extra five minute break to go get food or just not have to take in more information would be greatly appreciated. But overall, I genuinely enjoyed taking physics this summer, so thanks for a great summer Mr. Blake!

Light Refraction

Moving from reflection to refraction today, we learned about the bending of light instead of the bouncing of light. Light refraction happens in lenses, or even in raindrops. It's how we can see rainbows, and how we can set physics notes on fire in the quad with magnifying glasses. Another application of refracting light happens in our eyes. As someone who's worn glasses or contacts since the 2nd grade, I actually found this pretty interesting. When light hits someones eye, the light bends at the lens of our eye, refracting it so that it hits the retina, so that we can see the light. For me, because I'm nearsighted, the lens of my eye doesn't quite bend the light the right way, so the light actually hits just before my retina, making everything blurry. My glasses bend the light in such a way that it hits exactly my retina, letting me see clearly.

Light Mixing

           Mr. Blake warned us that today was his favorite day, but (no offense, Mr. Blake) I wasn't too excited because I couldn't be sure that he wasn't super stoked about some new equation or other mathematic hell.  As it turned out though, the day was really cool. We learned about how colored lights work, and the day ended up looking something like this:

            We relearned the color wheel from first grade art class, but now instead of using it for pigments, we're using it as the color that gets reflected from a surface. For example, the reason my wall is blue (besides an extraordinary amount of paint) is that when a white light is shone on it, there are red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet rays all hitting the wall. Because the wall is blue, it's only going to reflect the blue light into our eyes, so that we see it as blue. All the other colors will be absorbed by the wall, so that all we see is the blue.

Unit 10 - Light and Color

Today we began our last unit, about light and color. Light is a wave, like the waves that we learned about last unit, except these are electromagnetic waves. There's an electromagnetic spectrum, which holds the range of different wavelengths, frequencies, and energies. This range goes from violet to red, and from a higher frequency to a lower frequency. The higher the frequency is, the more energy it has.

Different electronic devices have different types and frequencies of waves. For example, radios and TV's have a range of about 500 kilohertz to 1000 megahertz. Basically, all you need to hear a certain channel or station is a device that can get to the right frequency. You can even listen in on phone calls by figuring out a certain phones frequency and matching it.

Unit 9 - Waves and Sound

 Sound is a vibration that causes a longitudinal wave
Pitch is the frequency of sound, the higher the frequency, the higher the pitch, and vice versa. All frequencies travel at the same speed if it's at the same temperature.

One thing that I learned about waves and sound that's actually really applicable to my life would be about the waves in garage/gate openers. I know the exact spot that I can click my gate opener and have it work, and I know that if I'm just a little bit off of that spot then I'm too far away, and the waves won't reach my gate and open it. Mr. Blake told us that if you put your clicker on your elbow or by your head, then the frequency travels through you, basically using you as a human antenna so that the waves can travel further.

Here's how far away from my gate I can be normally, without holding the opener up to my elbow:

And here's how far away I can be when I do hold the opener up to my elbow:

Unit 9 - Waves

      

 

     This picture doesn't actually show a wave very well... but let's just pretend. The 'wave' in the picture, appears to be moving towards the shore. This isn't technically true, since it's only the wave energy that's moving, while the water is just the medium that the energy is moving through. It's a transverse wave, because the energy is moving perpendicular to the velocity of the wave. Throughout the duration of this wave, the velocity should stay constant, even if the amplitude or wavelength changes.

    The principle of superposition states that two different waves can occupy the same space and time. This means that when two waves collide, they actually go through each other instead of bouncing back, the way the carts did when we did the air track labs.

Launch Day

What design features were included in your rocket design?
    Our rocket had fins and a parachute with a funnel functioning as a nose cone. The fins were triangular and on the small side, and the parachute was cut from a white trash bag. Instead of using the whole bag intact, we chose to cut it into a circle so it would have greater air resistance and surface area.We put some clay in the nose cone in hopes that it would help the nose cone come off during the rockets descent.

What worked as planned? What did not work as planned?
    During our best launch time, at 16.7 seconds, our parachute finally deployed. It only deployed towards the end of the rockets descent, but it was still more successful than any of our other launches, when the nose cone wouldn’t come off, keeping the parachute from opening up. The fins seemed to be successful though, as our rocket was pretty much stable throughout all the launches. We had been using a small funnel as a nose cone for the past few days, and for about half of our launches today. During one of the rockets launches, the funnel broke upon impact. Luckily we had an extra funnel, that was slightly bigger. It seemed to make it easier for the nose cone to come off and let the parachute expand, giving us more time in the air.

psi at launch - 80
Amount of water in bottle - about half full, slightly under.

The physics learned - We learned (mostly by trial and error) a lot about how much air resistance can affect the rocket. In our case, it worked to our advantage because it was the air resistance that worked with the parachute to keep our rocket in the air for as long as possible. We also learned about how each element of the rocket relates to what kind of flight path it takes. The higher the psi, the more acceleration the rocket had in the air. On some of the rockets that went REALLY high, you could easily see the “fast slow stop slow fast” idea in action. Pretty much all the rockets went high enough that you could see it’s jump in acceleration as it got closer to the ground. I’m super proud of our class since our average was well above 8 at 10.9!