Measuring Around…
“All objects near the surface of earth accelerate with same acceleration”
Are we sure?
People like Galileo won’t just blindly believe it! They would test it-
‘Let’s go to the top of leaning tower of Pisa, let’s drop two bodies with different masses, and let’s see if they actually fall at the same time.’
Wow! THEY JUST DID!
That’s how you do Physics! And not just that, one can also calculate the value of acceleration due to gravity by using second equation of motion, s=ut+12at2, to obtain
H = 12gt2
All you have to do is-
-Measure the height of the tower
-Note the time of fall using a stop watch
Measured height | Time of fall | Calculated ‘g’ |
200cm | 0.6s | 11.11m/s2 |
201cm | 0.65s | 9.51m/s2 |
200cm | 0.62s | 10.4m/s2 |
Hence, average calculated ‘g’ comes out to be 10.34m/s2. Though the error comes out to be of 5%, it has more or less verified the value of ‘g’ as expected.
Now, for this activity, we are going to be Galileos. But let’s move ahead of finding the value of ‘g’ and let’s setup a cool experiment ourselves and see how our own predictions on the basis of laws of Physics work out in real life.
Objective
Setup an experiment to study the motion of an object(s)/ some physical phenomenon
Predict the motion, or the phenomenon, on the basis of known laws like Conservation of Energy, Conservation of Linear Momentum, Laws of Motion, or equations of motion, etc.
Record the video of experimentally verifying if our predictions (or phenomena) are correct.
Make a report of the whole experiment