This past friday, I was watching the UH vs. Nevada football game on ESPN2, which turned out to be an amazing game. There was a lot of physics in play as players on both sides were getting nailed left and right. In this particular play, I remember seeing Tyler Graunke, the quarterback for Hawaii, taking a while to get off the ground after being hit by the Nevada player. It made me realize that a lot of momentum must have been transferred from the tackler to Graunke as he could really feel the hit. Because the defender's velocity and mass were both fairly high, a lot of momentum was transferred to Graunke who eventually tranferred it to the ground. Also, in the final play of the game, Hawaii's kicker, Dan Kelly, needed to generate lots of force and velocity on the football as he kicked it through the goal posts to preserve the victory. It was an extremely exciting game but I was still able to find the physics taking place.

This past weekend my friends and I went to Dave and Buster's to play some pool and video games. While we were there, I realized that there was a lot of physics going on. In pool, momentum is transferred from the white cue ball to either a solid color ball or striped ball depending on which team you are on. Because the mass of all the balls are the same, the velocity determines the momentum that each ball has. Although not all of the momentum is conserved due to the friction created between the surface of the table and ball, a large majority is. An even better example of the conservation of momentum is when we played shuffleboard. As the pucks are thrown across the board, there is barely any friction between the puck and the table. Therefore, almost all of the momentum is transferred to a fast moving puck, to one that is resting still. This reminded me of the air puck lab because that lab was also created to eliminate almost all of friction.

A couple weekends ago, our basketball team had a beach clean-up on the north shore at some beach park. We were able to raise money to help pay for our trip to Tennessee this Christmas. Anyway, while we were picking up trash, I realized that there was physics involved everytime someone threw the pieces of trash away. The amount of work required to lift different sizes of trash off the ground varied according to the weight of the object being thrown away. While I had great power because I would lift the heaviest objects quickly, other people took much longer to lift objects which were similar in weight. One of the heavier objects that we found was a skeleton of a fairly large dog. Because some players filled their bags with more trash, they did more work than the other players and parents. This was such a typical activity that I didn't initially think physics was involved.