Great Adventure

Reading your labs is the great adventure. It seems that many of you entered an entirely new universe at the amusement park. If you are still working on ours, try to avoid creating a whole new regime of physics. Try doing some intelligent observation and deduction. Your mass in Kg is your pounds/2.205 something between 50 and 90 kg for most of you.  Momentum changes if speed changes and momentum is low when you go slow no matter how high you are. PE increases with height.

For example:

Most of you seem to think that when you feel a force 3 times your weight you actually feel lighter than normal. 

Some of you think your mass is about  6 kg, the equivalent of 13 lbs. Many of you think we should use pounds instead of Newtons for wieght in metric calculations. You seem to forget that your weight is mass (kg) x g    (g  is 9.8 N/kg on earth).

Some of you claim the outer and inner ring of horses on the carousel were just .3 m apart, i.e. 1 foot. It must have been pretty crowded on that ride.

Some of you think the inner horses go around more rotations than the outer ones. Neat trick

Others think the horses go up and down 65 or even 90 times per rotation  of the carousel. That would be a pretty exciting ride. A few said the ride took 3 minutes to go around once, because the period is the time to amke one cycle, not the time from the start of the ride to when it finishes

Many of you confuse momentum and energy. In fact you use the word momentum with no indication that you know what it means. To say the ride builds momentum as it rises even though it nearly stops at the top of the first hill, is to show you really don't know that momentum = mass x velocity. To say momentum is the the same throughout the ride is worse since the v is very high at the bottom.

Most of you can recognize that KE = m v^2/2 especially when it is written o every second page of the lab sheeet.  Some of you say that maxium KE and maximum speed occur at different places, even though KE is proportional to speed squared. Can maximum speed squared occur at some place where the speed is not the maximum?

Some of you think gravity was pulling you upward at the top of the loop, this is a most unusual direction for the gravitational force.

There is more, but I must go back to reading the installments in science fiction and fantasy you have prepared for my entertainment.