Blog 3: Going With the Flow

This past weekend, I was looking at some old photos from my previous volleyball trips. I came across this picture of my friend and I swimming in a river in Reno. As you can see the current was very strong and there was hardly any friction except a few occasional rocks. We would have traveled at a constant speed all the way down the river because our net force would be zero, so we would have no acceleration. To prevent ourselves from floating all the way down the river, we started to swim against the current to create friction and a net force. We would still have a positive acceleration until the friction caused by our swimming was greater than the force of the current. If we were stopped by a rock on the way down the river, our net force and acceleration would also be zero because friction would equal the force of the current. I realized that this is a great example of Newton's 2nd law.