The Last Post

When I think about physics, the first thing that comes to mind is obviously that physics is the study of the motion of various things in the world. I think that though my knowledge of physics has greatly expanded, my understanding of the definition of what physics is has not really evolved throughout the summer. I learned much more than I ever imagined in this class. I had no idea that I would be so enlightened at the end of this summer. I learned the true answers to all the childhood questions I had about colors and that was pretty cool to say the least. I think that this class was actually very fun. Going into it I thought that this class was going to be so hard and challenging for me. I found this class to have its moments of challenge and pain, as expected but in the end I am very happy with how I did and what I learned.

This class was actually very fun for me. I think that Mr. Blake having his own special way of doing things made this class fun as well. Mr. Blake was able to get me interested in physics and I think that helped me in the end to really learn things here.
The only real improvement I can think of is that sometimes the class felt, dare I say a little bit too slow. There were a few times I really had to struggle to keep alert and interested which made my life hard.
Overall I had a very good experience in summer physics and I am glad that I decided to take the class.

Here's a picture of a random wave from my desktop to represent this summer.

Unit 10-Sun

Today we learned about how the eye see things such as reflections in a mirror and light from sources like candles, light bulbs, the sun, and other things. This picture of my car basking in the glorious sunset outside the City Mill store shows how my eye was seeing the light from the sun. The parallel ray from my eye to the sun just happens to be parallel to the ground and the focal ray will cross paths with the parallel ray to show just where my eye is truly seeing the light coming from then sunset. The central ray in all of this crazy will mainly serve as something that will help me to focus both of my rays on the point that my eyes are seeing the sunset at. This is confusing. Oh well.

Unit 10-Pretty Colors

Today in class we got to play with lights and lasers. We learned that colors of light mix in many ways to create various different combinations of light that when combined correctly are quite amazing. We learned that the primary colors of light are red, blue, and green when mixed, these three colors will create white light. When mixing a few combinations of these colors you get things like magenta and yellow and my personal favorite, cyan, which is a product of blue and green. We also learned why the sky is blue and why the ocean is also blue. We even learned why the sun sets red in our Hawaiian sky. It sets red because there is so much junk in the air.

Unit 9- Grand Waltz

This picture of dancers explains sound and sound waves because we make sound with our pointe shoes as we move and jump through the Sleeping Beauty Grand Waltz Variation that we performed this morning. As our pointe shoes strike the ground, they are vibrating, causing a sound to be formed at some frequency when we hit the ground with our shoes. Since the box/ tip of the shoe is hard and made of burlap and cardboard, they hit the ground quite hard which in turn, causes the sound and vibration made by the shoes to be quite loud. Not something we want when performing. Hopefully nobody will really notice it.

Unit 9- Slater

This wonderful photograph of Kelly Slater surfing at pipeline explains this unit because he is on a wave. That is the main thing we are learning about in this unit. Kelly here is surfing on a transverse wave. This means that his wave is perpendicular to the direction in which he is going. Now, being the great surfer that he is, Kelly is able to utilize the various amplitudes of the waves to his advantage. The change in the amplitude of the wave allows Kelly to surf said wave for a longer period of time; making it infinitely cooler for on lookers like my self who have no idea how to surf, much less how to even stand up on the board. Ok, I'm lying, I tried surfing once; never again.

The final day of launching

Today was the day we've all waited for. We all launched our rockets and the end goal was to get 10 seconds in the air or more, if we really wanted to beat Mr. Adam's class. My group passed... yay. We are a little bit upset though. We did get 10 seconds but we really wanted to surpass our previous launch which was 13 seconds.

Our rocket had some great thought put into it and that resulted in a parachute, 4 fins and a detachable nose cone. We did take a good bit of time to make the parachute but in the end, it was worth it. The parachute did not deploy as planned today but that was due to our inadequate folding. The parachute got stuck in the nose cone. The string that was on our nose cone connecting it to the rocket also broke today. We ended up replacing the string with something thicker and stronger and that seemed to work well.  The one time the parachute deployed was utterly fantastic. The whole day led up to that moment and it finally happened.

Due to lack of PSI gauges on the pumps, we did not get an accurate reading of our PSI. We just pumped until we could pump no more. We decided that we were going to fill out 2 liter bottle half way with water. We tried that a few times and it did not work so we then changed our amount to just under half of the bottle and that worked for us.

This project taught me that in order for the rocket to float gently down to the ground we have to make sure that we have a parachute that is functional. It also taught me that you have to make sure that everything is in its proper place before you begin the process of launching the rocket. I also learned that you have to just keep on going because the result that you want to get will happen it just takes some time and patience.

Rockets Rock!

Today we had a lot of time to work on our rocket design and to work on any improvements we wanted to make on the rocket. My group decided to make a fairly large parachute out of a tablecloth that was purchased from Wal-Mart.  Of course our tablecloth is fabulous and tie-dyed, because who buys normal plain tablecloths? Just no. It had to be fabulous. Our design was quite simple; we cut the tablecloth into a circle and fastened 8 strings on it that were equally spaced out from each other. We re-enforced the parachute with duct tape. As far as the rocket goes, the most daring thing we did to it was add an extra fin, which happened to work really well. Our last launch was by far the best one we have done. We got a time of 13.15 seconds.