rallain | December 15, 2009Maybe you have noticed how much material there was (for me at least) in last week's MythBusters. One of the myths they looked at was the bus jumping over a gap in the road from the movie Speed. I am not looking at that myth, it has been discussed many times in many places. Rather, I am going to talk about scaling the motion. As typical with the MythBusters, they like to make a scaled down version of the event. It's cheaper that way. In this case, they made a 1/12th scale model of the bus and the road. The question was: how fast should the model go?
The first question to ask is: what do…
rallain | December 14, 2009There was a question from Jerry in a previous post:
"A simple question for which I can't find an answer: Why do you have to collimate light spectroscopy? What would happen if you didn't collimate it?"
The basic idea of spectroscopy is to look at the different colors of light coming from some source. Typically light from a source (like an excited gas) is passed through a diffraction grating that makes different colors bend different amounts (like a prism, only better).
Collimated light is basically light that is all going the same direction. How about I go ahead and draw a picture. This is…
rallain | December 14, 2009The solar system is difficult to show correctly. Why? It is difficult because the size of things are vastly different. Let me use units common in solar-system astronomy, the Astronomical Unit (or AU). One AU is the distance from the Sun to the Earth. If I want to look at all the planets, I would need to go out to about 30 AU (to Neptune - remember that Pluto is not a planet). That is not a problem but then if I want to look at the size of even the Sun, it is just 0.001 AU across. And the Earth is even smaller, at 0.0001 AU. So that is the problem. The distance from the Sun to Neptune…
rallain | December 10, 2009It is the end of the semester, and I hear stuff. A lot of this stuff I do not like to hear. This is a sample (essentially):
"I don't have to take the final in that class, the instructor said I just have to organize some folders instead"
"I got an A on all the tests, but the instructor said my grade was a B because I missed too many classes"
Those are just two examples I have heard recently. When I hear these kinds of things, I try not to pass judgment on other faculty because I am only hearing one side of the story (I can only imagine what crazy things students say about me). However, I…
rallain | December 10, 2009This picture has been all over the blogs.
I don't want to talk about this picture too much - that has been done (a good summary discussion can be found at Bad Astronomy). Apparently, this is some type of rocket mistake or something.
Although the picture is cool, it is not as cool as this simulation that someone made.
Here is the best shot from the video:
Maybe that picture didn't turn out so well. The point is that someone made a simulation (I assume it is a simulation, and not just an animation). How do you know if a simulation is any good? You look and see how well it compares with…
rallain | December 10, 2009Have I not made it clear how much I like the MythBusters? Also, I am totally aware that they are not (nor do they claim to be) scientists. Really, this is what makes their show appealing (maybe?). So here is the problem now. And, it is not just the MythBusters - I see other shows making the same mistake.
If two things are colliding, how do you characterize the collision? No one really gets this right. For this particular episode, the MythBusters were looking at the collision between a bullet and gun. They wanted to see how hard it would be to shoot a gun out of someone's hand. The…
rallain | December 9, 2009This is a requested post. Clearly, I do requests. The idea here is that I am going to give all the details needed to determine the equation of motion (and then model it) for a basic pendulum. Warning: this post is a little more advanced than my normal posts. There are some prerequisites. You need to understand derivatives. I will assume that you do. Here is a pendulum. (and this time I will stick to my variables)
Like I said before, this is a tricky problem unless I use some tricks. The problem is that the tension the string exerts on the mass changes. Here is my trick: think about a…
rallain | December 7, 2009So, it snowed here (in Louisiana). Sure, it wasn't a lot, but it was still a big deal. The following day, there was still some snow on the house roofs. I took some pictures. Here is a shot looking at the North side of a house.
And here is a view of the South side of the same roof.
What is so cool about that? All the houses were the same way. North side of roof = snow. South side = no snow. At first, I was going to use these pictures to talk about flux. Basically, since the Sun is lower in the South sky the southern side of the roof gets more solar energy flux. Then I realized my…
rallain | December 6, 2009Looking back at part I of this idea, I don't think I did a very good job. Let me summarize the key things I wanted to say:
Normally, there are two ways of modeling the motion of an object:
Calculating the forces on the object and using the momentum principle or Newton's second law (which are the same thing). I called this the Newtonian way. The problem with this method is forces that constrain the motion (like the normal force). These forces have a variable magnitude to make the object stay on a particular surface.
Defining some variables that describe the system as it is constrained.…
rallain | December 4, 2009This post has been sitting in my mind for quite some time. Really, it is about mechanics - not about pendulums. What is the goal in mechanics (classical mechanics, if you like)? Generally, it is to find out how something changes over time. If you could get an equation of motion, that would do it.
As Matt (Built on Facts) did a while ago, it can be shown that you can get the equation of motion for a mass on a spring with normal Newtonian mechanics or with Lagrangian mechanics. Let me summarize two different ways of looking at the motion of an object.
The Newtonian Way
Maybe that isn't the…
rallain | December 3, 2009I showed this demo in class and I was surprised at how cool the students thought it was.
They actually thought it was some kind of trick. It is not a trick. Instead, this is an example of the angular momentum principle. If you want to try this yourself, I guess you are going to have to find some type of wheel. I attempted to get this to work with a small Lego wheel, but it wouldn't spin fast enough. You should be able to do this with one of those toy gyroscopes though. Anyway, here is the angular momentum principle:
Or, if you prefer it without a derivative it could be written as:…
rallain | December 1, 2009One of the roads near my house was just redone. They added some awesome retroreflectors in the middle. Here is a shot. No wait, I don't have a picture of that. I tried to take one, but it just didn't turn out very well. Oh, you know what it is supposed to look like. It looks like little tiny lights in the middle of the road.
What makes these things so cool? Why do they look like they are battery powered or something? Maybe it would be helpful to compare retroreflectors to some other materials. I can group stuff in the following manner:
Shiny stuff
Non-shiny stuff
Retroreflectors…
rallain | November 30, 2009I am moving to ScienceBlogs.com. So, as I have said before, basically it will be the same stuff, new server. As of right now, only my new stuff is at http://ScienceBlogs.com/dotphysics, but soon all my old stuff will be there too.
To summarize:
It is not you, it's me.
Thousand points of light.
Change your bookmarks (do people even still use those?)
Change your RSS reader.
Update
Here is the RSS feed at the new sitehttp://scienceblogs.com/dotphysics/index.xml
rallain | November 29, 2009The more I think about the last MythBusters' exploding water heater, the more cool things I see. How about I look at the energy of the explosion. There are three things I can look at:
How much energy went into the water heater from the electric source?
How much kinetic energy did the water heater have right after the explosion?
How much thermal energy did the water and water heater have?
How much gravitational potential energy did the heater have at it's highest point?
Hopefully, I can show that the energy in from the electric source is greater or equal to kinetic plus thermal. Also, the…
rallain | November 26, 2009This year's episode of Punkin Chunkin is coming up (I think tomorrow). Discovery just showed a teaser commercial with the specifications for one team's machine. If you are not familiar with Punkin Chunkin (World Championship Punkin Chunkin), the basic idea is to project some pumpkins. (note, if you waiting for the Discovery Channel show for the 2009 Punkin Chunkin, don't click on the previous link, it has the results already).
One of the categories for Punkin Chunkin is the centrifugal machine. These are machines that spin pumpkins around really fast in circles to shoot them. They are…
rallain | November 25, 2009
I feel like a just came to a new school, or a new place. Well, I have migrated servers before, so this shouldn't be too bad. It really is nice to be here at ScienceBlogs. If you are unfamiliar with what I do, basically I can summarize:
Analyze stuff I see. This is usually from a TV show or a movie. I often will use video analysis and/or numerical calculations with python.
Explanation of basic physics concepts. I like to include diagrams.
Teaching and learning stuff. I like to teach, I like to learn. It is only natural that I talk about teaching and learning.
Science, the nature of…
rallain | November 23, 2009Everyone knows, or should know how much I like MythBusters. Here is the problem. Below is a picture of Adam analyzing the motion of a an exploding water heater.
Actually, I applaud Adam for his creative use of the vernier caliper. Really, it is an example of "making things work". However, in this case there is a very nice alternative - Tracker Video Analysis. So, here is what I am going to do. This will be a short tutorial on using Tracker. I will use the same video from the episode of the exploding water heater. The goal - how fast and how high did the water heater go. Or as the…
rallain | November 20, 2009In my previous post on launching a pumpkin (punkin chunkin) I essentially just looked at what happens to the pumpkin after it is launched. How fast would you have to shoot it to go 1 mile? The answer seems to be around 1000 mph and they are currently shooting them around 600 mph.
The question for this post, how fast can you launch a pumpkin so that it does not smash into smithereens? First, why would it smash at all? Here is a diagram of a pumpkin being launched while still in the tube.
The pumpkin launcher works by releasing compressed air inside the tube. This means that the force…
rallain | November 19, 2009Last night I saw the newest episode of MythBusters. One of the myths they revisited was the exploding water heater. Well, it turns out that I had an analysis of this first explosion, but I didn't move it over when I switched software. So, here it is.
In case you never saw the first episode of exploding water heaters, here is the important part:
If you are impatient, here are the answers (from the video analysis):
Time of flight = 11.8 seconds
Max height = 167 meters = 548 feet
Launch speed = 234 mph
Speed on impact with the ground = 76 mph
First, from re-watching the video, I can see (…
rallain | November 13, 2009Not really. Here are the details (and some data) for the Millikan Oil Drop Experiment without the oil drop that I talked about previously (originally from The Physics Teacher - lucky you, it was a featured article so it should still be available (pdf)).
The basic idea that Lowell McCann and Earl Blodgett from U of Wisconsin propose is to do an experiment similar to the oil drop experiment, but not so squinty (if you have done the oil drop experiment, you know what I mean). Instead of dropping charged oil in an electric field, they drop containers with metal nuts in water. The goal is to…