And We Return

A nice Veteran's Day off and then back to work. For Physical Science, the day was spent engaged in an examination of action/reaction forces. Your graphs nicely demonstrated that with interacting objects, forces are simultaneously and mutually generated that are equal in magnitude and opposite in direction. Even if one of the objects in the system was inanimate - like the lab bench or a chair. Using a rubber band didn't change the pattern either. Also, a reminder that this not an example of balanced forces. Balanced forces are two equal and opposite forces acting on ONE object. Action/reaction forces act on TWO DIFFERENT objects. We will discuss this more fully tomorrow and introduce a new concept - momentum.

Physics further explored the concept of work by adding in its tie to energy. Kinetic and gravitational potential energy were discussed and, tomorrow, we'll add elastic potential energy. Remember that kinetic energy is associated with active work, while the potential energies are waiting to do work or represent work done on an object where the energy was stored. The lab unit into which we'll move on Friday will study all three of these energies and the idea of energy conservation.

Honors Physics - Conservation of mechanical energy was the topic of the day, which will be explored in tomorrow's lab activity. Remember to read ahead about simple harmonic motion and Hooke's law, along with the lab activity, before tomorrow. It will facilitate the analysis of the lab data quite a bit if certain aspects of SHM are already in the brain. Some, we discussed today with our example of a pendulum and energy conversions, so keep that in mind also. The test is on the calendar for next Tuesday.

Physics LOLdog pic for today: