projectile motion

If you want to be a Major League Baseball pitcher, you need to be able to throw a ball really fast—like 85 to 100 miles per hour. The faster the pitch, the less time a batter has to react and swing the bat, which means you have a greater…

There are three forces acting on the debris. First, there's the downward-pulling gravitational force (Fg) due to the interaction with the Earth. This force depends on both the mass (m) of the object and the gravitational field (g = 9.8…

If you drop an object, it will fall. It's a motion that we’ve all seen hundreds of times. We’ve also all seen plenty of the moon, which makes one complete orbit around our planet every 27.3 days (as seen from the Earth). Falling and…

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, by Randall Munroe, the author of the xkcd comics.You can play it by clicking…

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 at the basket—from the far side of the court. The ball goes in. OK, I can believe…

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 we call "elastic collisions," both kinetic energy and momentum are conserved. In…

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 complicated. After it leaves your hand, the ball has a gravitational interaction with the…

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 "constant velocity." Since this is a plot of position vs. time, the slope of the line will…

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 horizontal motion to calculate the time, and then use that amount of time in the…

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 parabolic. Even better, the coefficient in front of the t2 term should be the acceleration…