A Year of Physics

Wow! I believe that this is our last physics blog. Well, its been an interesting year and I have definitely learned a lot. For my last physics blog, I feel that it is fitting to return to my first post, where I told my impressions of the first four weeks of class. At that point I felt as though physics was a tightrope that I was struggling to balance on. This feeling lasted through the year, as physics is a fun, yet dificult subject.

In this blog, I am going to talk about something similar to a tight rope, a see-saw. When I was little an in Georgia I used to play on a big wooden sea-saw all the time. A see-saw is a great example of torque. Torque is measured by force times the cross product of the lever arm. This can be useful in figuring out where to sit on a see-saw to make it balanced with people of different weights. The lever arm of a see-saw is measured from the fulcrum where the weight of just the board can be balanced. In other words, if there are two people of the same weight they would need to sit the same distance from the fulcrum, but on opposite sides. If one person weighs twice the other, the lighter person needs to sit twice as far from the fulcrum as the other.