trampoline!!!

so.. over the summer, i did a lot of crazy stuff. one of them was buy a huge trampoline! me and my friend landon just decided one day that we should be a trampoline, so we called up sports authority and got one. it was 12 feet by 12 feet!! we set it up in my neighbor's yard(landon's aunty's house) and began to jump. it was a lot of fun. well just thinking back to that, i realized there was some physics involved when i jumped on the trampoline. as my feet lifted off from the trampoline, my body accelerated in the air...but immediately started to slow down. my body was being affected by the earth's gravity. i still began to rise but slowly came to a stop, when i reached the peak of my jump. then like all things, my body came back down. i began to accelerate again, this time toward the ground in free fall at a rate of -9.8 m/s squared. this would continue until my legs reached the trampoline again. i realized that my body was doing exactly what we were doing in class, only thing in class we were throwing balls up toward the roof and we had a sensor underneath. or when we measured our hang time and actually jumped to stick tape on the wall. i wish i could calculate the hang time i had with the trampoline. that would be awesome.

Physics of Pool

This weekend i had some friends over to play pool at my house. This is a picture of me shooting the ball in one of the games. At that very moment i realized that this was physics. So i got my camera and took a picture. When the stick hits the ball, depending on how hard, the force will be transferred from the stick to the ball causing the ball to accelerate forward. The ball will accelerate for a little while until it reaches a constant speed. The friction of the ball and the fabric then plays a big factor because this causes the ball to decrease in velocity going in a forward motion. Velocity is the speed and direction an object is moving and acceleration is the change in velocity over a certain amount of time. The cue ball sitting on the table has an initial velocity of zero until i hit it with the stick. Then the cue ball accelerates, holds a constant velocity, then decreases in velocity. When the cue ball comes in contact with the ball you were aiming at, it stops instantly and the force is transferred to the ball it hit. This causes the ball to accelerate into a pocket.