sad sad day

Tomorrow is the last test that we'll have for AP physics B. This year has been loads of fun. Hanging out in Doc's room during frees, eating Doc's food, complaining about the endless supply of quizzes. Yup. Well, one thing I'm thankful for today, besides my mom of course, is the great preparation that Doc and this course have given me. I woke up today thinking about what to study and realized that all the tests we've taken, all the quizzes, and even our final exam have already helped me prepare in so many ways. If we didn't practice taking those past AP exam questions, I would be in a very bad situation right now. Of course there are still many MANY things that I do not understand and must study, but thanks to Doc he has made this weekend a lot less stressful than it could have been. My final physics blog topic is a difficult one to come up with, so I just want to talk about what kind of role physics plays in our lives. Chem and Bio were definitely fun courses, but to me, they felt a bit too abstract. Physics definitely felt more "real" to me, and as I learned more about it, I realized just how much physics there is around me. There is physics when I ride in a car, when I walk on the street, when I open a can of soda. There's physics all around the world, physics in space, and physics in things such as sound and light. Overall, physics just plays such a large role in my life, and probably in any life, that I can't imagine anyone not studying such an important subject. So good luck to everyone on the AP exam tomorrow.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=cIIwwCi2zwk

angles

Well today when i was on the tennis court and missing a lot of my volleys, i thought, "hmm, what does I need to do in order for the ball i hit to go where i want it to go." Then it occurred to me that the ball and racket could be thought of as a ray and a mirror. Physics teaches us that the incident angle is equal to the reflected angle when a light ray is shone on a mirror. Therefore if I just placed my racket's face so that the reflected angle would go in the intended direction, then my shots would be more accurate. This also leads us to the topic of refraction and indexes. Using snell's law nsintheta=nsintheta, we can determine the angle of reflection when a ray travels through two mediums that have different indexes of refraction, such as air and water, or air and glass.