You Can Use This Silly Game to Do Some Serious Physics
I'm a sucker for interesting online games that don't have a score or even a goal. In this case, it's a cartoon space simulator to promote the book What If? 2…
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projectile motion
How to Use Physics to Tell If That Steph Curry Video Is Real
A few weeks ago, Sports Illustrated tweeted this video of Golden State Warriors point guard Steph Curry that instantly went viral. It shows him taking a shot…
What Actually Happens If You Shoot a Ball at a Newton’s Cradle?
So, here’s the obvious next question: Is kinetic energy also conserved, just like momentum is conserved? The answer is: sometimes. For some collisions that…
The World Is Messy. Idealizations Make the Physics Simple
Sometimes the universe is just too complicated to analyze.Heck, if you take a tennis ball and toss it across the room, even that is practically too…
Why Buzz Lightyear’s Rocket Launch Looks Better Than Reality
This graph says that the vertical position of the rocket increases by a (nearly) constant amount from one frame to the next. In physics, we call that…
Will Nathan Drake Make This Jump in the Uncharted Trailer?
The time it takes for Drake to move in the vertical direction is the exact same time it takes for him to move horizontally. This means that I can use the…
The Physics of Johnny Knoxville, Human Cannonball
The important thing is that this is the equation of a parabola. Looking back at the vertical position data from the video, it at least seems fairly…