Daily Physics Discussion

Let's start discussion about Physics in daily life

[Video] : 5 Fun Physics Phenomena

Fun Physics phenomena you can do at home. Such as fun thing but increase our physics experience. It was explained well by Veritasium

[Video] : Physics in Everyday Life

This session explains What is physics and where we see physics in our everyday lives? It has explained clearly by Letstute Check this out!

[Ask] : How can momentum but not energy be conserved in an inelastic collision?

All of the existing answers miss the real difference between energy and momentum in an inelastic collision.

We know energy is always conserved and momentum is always conserved so how is it that there can be a difference in an inelastic collision?

It comes down to the fact that momentum is a vector and energy is a scalar.

Imagine for a moment there is a "low energy" ball traveling to the right. The individual molecules in that ball all have some energy and momentum associated with them: 

The momentum of this ball is the sum of the momentum vectors of each molecule in the ball. The net sum is a momentum pointing to the right. You can see the molecules in the ball are all relatively low energy because they have a short tail.

Now after a "simplified single ball" inelastic collision here is the same ball:

As you can see, each molecule now has a different momentum and energy but the sum of all of all of their momentums is still the same value to the right.

Even if the individual moment of every molecule in the ball is increased in the collision, the net sum of all of their momentum vectors doesn't have to increase.

Because energy isn't a vector, increasing the kinetic energy of molecules increases the total energy of the system.

This is why you can convert kinetic energy of the whole ball to other forms of energy (like heat) but you can't convert the net momentum of the ball to anything else.

[History] : Newton's apple: The real story

We've all heard the story. A young Isaac Newton is sitting beneath an apple tree contemplating the mysterious universe. Suddenly - boink! -an apple hits him on the head. "Aha!" he shouts, or perhaps, "Eureka!" In a flash he understands that the very same force that brought the apple crashing toward the ground also keeps the moon falling toward the Earth and the Earth falling toward the sun: gravity.

Or something like that. The apocryphal story is one of the most famous in the history of science and now you can see for yourself what Newton actually said. Squirreled away in the archives of London's Royal Society was a manuscript containing the truth about the apple.

It is the manuscript for what would become a biography of Newton entitled Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton's Life written by William Stukeley, an archaeologist and one of Newton's first biographers, and published in 1752. Newton told the apple story to Stukeley, who relayed it as such:

"After dinner, the weather being warm, we went into the garden and drank thea, under the shade of some apple trees...he told me, he was just in the same situation, as when formerly, the notion of gravitation came into his mind. It was occasion'd by the fall of an apple, as he sat in contemplative mood. Why should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground, thought he to himself..."

The Royal Society has made the manuscript available today for the first time in a fully interactive digital form on their website at royalsociety.org/turning-the-pages. The digital release is occurring on the same day as the publication of Seeing Further (HarperPress, £25), an illustrated history of the Royal Society edited by Bill Bryson, which marks the Royal Society's 350th anniversary this year.

So it turns out the apple story is true - for the most part. The apple may not have hit Newton in the head, but I'll still picture it that way. Meanwhile, three and a half centuries and an Albert Einstein later, physicists still don't really understand gravity. We're gonna need a bigger apple.