Blog 4: Roller Coasters

I was looking through my old volleyball trip pictures again and found more pictures that related to physics. These pictures were from the same trip as my other blog. On our way home from the volleyball tournament we stopped over in Vallejo, California and went to Six Flags. I realized that all the roller coasters we went one had potential and kinetic energy.

The roller coaster in the picture pulled us up the slant backwards and then it shot us forward at a great speed. As the roller coaster was pulling us up the slant, we were gaining potential energy because our height was increasing. When we reached the top of the slant, we reached the maximum potential energy of the ride. Also when we arrived at the top of the slant, the roller coaster stopped to keep us in suspense and we had zero kinetic energy. As we came down the slant we were gaining kinetic energy because we were accelerating and we were decreasing in potential energy because our height was decreasing. The factor that affected our potential energy was the height of the roller coaster and our speed affected our kinetic energy. Since our mass stayed constant, it was irrelevant to our potential and kinetic energy.

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.