Sunglasses At Night

So I'm driving along on a Friday night and I'm trying to drive safely because there are a lot of crazy drivers on the road. The traffic is heavy and I'm driving in a heavily lighted area. The lights from cars and the street lamps are all bothering me and I can not see because the glare is overbearing. I had an idea. At the time the people in the car thought I was crazy. They thought I would not be able to see well enough to drive. Well I was bold enough to put those sunglasses on and guess what. The sunglasses did not help much. The people in my car laughed at me. And here I went into a mindstate of physics to figure out what went wrong. I thought about how the light from the street lamps and the cars were unpolarized light. This means that there is no preferred vibrational direction for the accelerating electrons emmiting the light. Basically the electrons are not vibrating only vertically or only horizontally but rather combinations of both in a lot of directions. I then focused on the concept of glare. I thought glare happens because light comes off on a horizontal plane from horizontal surfaces and vertical from vertical surfaces. That's when it clicked. Even though my polarized sunglasses were acting as polarizers the filters in them were probably vertical. This would block out the glare from the horizontal surfaces but it would not block the glare from the vertical surfaces as the vertically traveling waves still can move easily through a vertical filter. This means whenever I looked at anything through my shades from a vertical surface there was still glare. I took off my shades happy with my conclusion and drove off into the night.

Guitars Not Metal Detectors

So our physics class had a test on magnets, electromagnets, and how they work to make a lot of things function in this world. One of the questions on the test was how a metal detector in an airport works. At the time of the test, I had no idea how it worked but later as I stared at my beautiful epiphone wildcat electric guitar I realized basically the same ideas are involved. Too bad I could not figure that out then; I had a total mind blank on that test. So how the guitar works is based off the idea of electromagnetic induction. A totally simple process that consist of permanent magnets, strings, and coil wrap around those magnets. A solid body or even a semi-hallow bodied electric guitar consists of these materials so it can be heard out of an amplifier so you can rock out with jimi, stevie ray, morello, synyster gates, or any other ill guitar player that has every existed. The pick ups on the guitar are the permanent magnets and under the surface of the guitar the magnets are wrapped in tightly wound coil. When a string is plucked or picked the magnetic field from the permanent magnet in the pick up beneath that string is felt by the vibrating string and induces a current into the string because the moving string feels a changing magnetic field as it is vibrating. In turn the string, now being a magnet, has a magnetic field of its own and the wrapped coil beneath the surface of the guitar gains a current by induction from the vibrating string of the same frequency and flows out through the guitar wire into the amp and is heard by all out of the speakers of the amp (wow that was a long sentence). Guitars are way cooler than metal detectors!

The Flying Monkey and The Compass

As my assitant and I were out in the great wilderness this weekend searching for the legendary flying monkey which only comes out at night, we somehow got lost and did know how to get out the lushes forest we were in (we were not really lost. we just wanted to construct a compass.) Luckily with my knowledge of physics and my assitants abundance in supplies we were able to construct a compass. I knew that if I had a pretty strong permanent magnet and some kind of small pin of iron I could align the domains in the pin and have the pin become magnetized.

Step 1: I take apart my assitant's high quality bose headphones and remove its permanent magnet which has the magnetic force equivalent to say a bar magnet.

Step 2: I removed the sewing needle from the sweater that my assitant was making for her grandmother and stroke it in one direction along the permanent magnet. This step aligned the domains within the the needle, making the needle now magnetized.

Step 3: Since it had just rained there were a few puddles around. I found a leaf and stuck the needle through it so the needle would float in the puddle. The needle roamed around for a little while until it pointed in one direction.

This is where it gets tricky. We did not know whether we stroked the needle on the north or south pole of the permanent magnet so we still not know what direction we were facing. Luckily we were not actually lost so we just packed up our stuff and went home.

A Tribute To Physics

I could write an epic essay on how I have learned much in physics but instead I will, for the readers benefit, write a blog length forum. Physics is a super fun subject and I am beginning to put together that everything has a relation to physics in some way. I really enjoy the various labs and experiments we do in class because it really connects me to a physical sense of what is going on instead of just words explaining it to me. My goal in physics class is just to gain a better grasp on the world around me. It is easy to be ignorant and not fully understand the complications of the world but I would like to comprehend the underlying roots of reason. I feel that I had a good first quarter. My homework, quizzes, tests, journals, and projects all came together to give me a better understanding of the subject. I could improve on my labs with certain questions. Sometimes I do not at first fully comprehend the relevance of a question and it catches me off guard. I'm sure if I just more thoroughly thought about the question I could figure out an answer for it. I truly find physics a fun class and I have learned a lot about various topics like waves, forms of energy, and different kind of forces. But those things have only scratched the surface and I am, just like Jables and Kage from Tenacios D, going after the P.O.D (Pick of Destiny) or in my case Physics On Demand. Keep up the great work Mr. Kohara. Experiments Rule!!!!