Air Resistance

I chose this picture of a sailboat that I took this past summer in Sweden for my blog because it’s the perfect example of what air resistance can do. If the wind is against the sailboat, air resistance prevents it from moving any further and vice versa if the wind is with the sailboat. However, the event I want to talk about took place a few days ago. I was walking with my friends, and it was really windy and the wind was against us. Yet again, physics popped into my head. It seemed like it was taking us a long time to walk to Jamba Juice because of the strong winds. Because the winds were so strong, it created a lot of air resistance, otherwise known as “drag”, which was keeping us from going very fast. On the way back, I noticed that it seemed like a shorter walk even though we walked the same distance as we did on the way there. This was because we weren’t experiencing as much air resistance since the wind was with us on the way back. This experience helped me to realize the effects of air resistance. I figured out that air resistance is basically the force that opposes the motion of an object. In this case, the air resistance was caused by the wind, so the wind was creating a force on my friends and me. We were having trouble walking as fast as we normally do because of the drag force acting against us, or air resistance.

Physics in a handstand

I’ve done a blog on the physics involved in doing a shoulder freeze before, but this time I’m going to talk about the physics involved in doing a handstand. In both break dancing moves, you kick your legs up into the air and have to balance by keeping them as perpendicular to the ground as possible. When I was learning how to do a handstand this past Tuesday in break dancing class, physics popped into my head when the teacher was explaining something to me. When you do a handstand you kick up one leg and then the other, and similarly, when you go back down, you put one leg back down and then the other. One time, I made the mistake of kicking both legs back down at the same time, and my teacher told me to make sure I put them down one after the other because it gives you more balance and less impact on the ground. That made me think of the concepts of momentum and impulse. If you kicked both legs back down at the same time, that would produce a much greater force than if you put them down separately. Force is equal to mass times acceleration, so when you put two legs down at the same time, your mass and acceleration are bigger, yielding a greater force. With a greater force comes a bigger impulse and more momentum too since impulse is equal to momentum.

Energy in a Waterfall

When I was looking through pictures on my computer, this picture that I took from Yellowstone two summers ago caught my eye. Most people think of waterfalls as magnificent, but they don't even know why. Waterfalls are cool to look at because of the transfer of potential energy to kinetic energy and the force of weight that acts on the water. As the water falls over the edge, its weight pulls it down to the bottom. At the top, the water has both potential and kinetic energy, but at the bottom, its potential energy is zero since the potential energy that it had was converted into kinetic energy. Its kinetic energy of the waterfall is what makes it spray off the surface of the water at the bottom, as seen in the picture. Therefore, the higher up the waterfall is, the more kinetic energy it will have at the bottom, so that's why the water shoots back up pretty high at the bottom. Although the waterfall in my picture doesn't look very tall, it was extremely tall, which is why you see a significant amount of mist made by it and a rainbow.

Physics in snowboarding/skiing

Because balance is such an important thing in snowboarding and skiing, they both involve some physics in them. For example, when you are snowboarding down an inclined hill, you have to lean your body towards the hill both when you are facing it and when you are facing downhill. You always lean towards the hill in order to keep your board balanced and not leaning downwards, otherwise you will fall downhill. As soon as you turn, your board is going directly downhill and starts accelerating. You don't want it to go too fast downhill if you aren't an expert, so you have to make sure you turn your hips as soon as you can to get the board to slow down. Skiing is different from snowboarding, but there is still a lot of similar physics involved in it. When you ski, you are never facing directly uphill, but if you are a beginner, you face sidewards a lot of the time. When skiing across a hill, you always want to keep your weight on the leg that is more uphill to keep your balance. If you are going straight downhill, you need to keep turning your hips so that you don't go too fast downhill. So if you are a beginner at either skiing or snowboarding, you will always have to think about the physics involved in these activities so that you don't hurt yourself on the mountain.

Break Dancing Freezes

There is a lot of physics involved in different break dancing moves that are on the ground. This specific freeze that I'm doing in the picture involves several things that are related to physics. For example, your shoulder and head are the main things holding you up in the air to counter the force of your weight, so you have to exert a pretty strong force on the ground to stay up. To get up in the air in the first place, you need to build up lots of momentum by sitting in the criss-cross leg position without actually crossing your legs and swaying back and forth several times. Once you have enough momentum, you can swing yourself down to one shoulder and put your head down after that. The momentum going towards that shoulder is what boosts you up into the air. But once you are in the air, you need to keep your legs straight and as perpendicular to the ground as possible so that you don't fall to one side. Break dancing moves definitely involve forces, momentum, and balance in them, so there are lots of physics-related things to think about while doing them.