gorekoya's blog

Apparently, magnifying glasses aren’t used for just magnification. I’ve always wondered how you can burn insects or start a fire with a magnifying glass. I’ve seen it done before but didn’t do my homework on it until now. The reason for these things to be possible is from Solar Energy. Solar Energy is energy from the sun. When you take a magnifying glass and angle it on the object, the rays from the sun goes through the lens, and forms a point of light for the sun to hit. The rays hit the insect, or sheet of paper causing it to heat up only if the temperature is high enough, the object is dry enough, and the lens is strong.

Photons are particles that carry light from the sun to the earth that is able to be seen with the human eye. Photons also contain energy in the form of heat, which is known as solar energy, that are narrowed down to a small area in which the heat is built. Since the heat is concentrated to such a small area, the heat can reach high temperatures and could get all the way up to 450 degrees Fahrenheit. The bigger the lens is, the easier it will be to start a fire or burn an insect.

There are many ways to start a fire with a magnifying glass. Another example is using the bottom of an aluminum can. First you have to polish the can in a unusual way but using chocolate. The chocolate will make the can more clear and it will appear like a mirror. After that you can take the magnifying glass and aim it so that the sun rays are passing through the lens to create heat on the can. Cool right? Or maybe I just think so..

Light energy has a huge factor in all of this. The light that is created by the sun is made up of photons like I stated earlier, tiny packets of electromagnetic energy. Not only do photons have particles, but they also have waves. This quality is important because the nature of photons means that they are refracted when they pass through different media. Photons passing through water change their speed, causing a ray of light to appear at a different angle above the water than below the water’s surface. The lenses on magnifying glasses are different from any other type of glass. These glasses are curved to refract light particles in a way that the image that you are looking at will appear to be bigger than what it is with a human eye, which is why the sun gives off more heat to objects under a magnifying glass. If you wanted to burn skin for what ever reason, you’d just have to find a spot and make sure that area is dry and magnified by the sun and you’d have yourself some burnt skin, unusual but possible. A combustible material, when exposed to heat and a source of oxygen, produces fire, like wood. You can have a magnifying glass over the object that you are trying to burn or create fire with, but if you angle it don’t hold the magnifying glass correctly and close enough you won’t be able to gather up enough heat to create a fire or to have an extra crispy ant.

So the moral of this blog is, to always carry a magnifying glass when camping because you never know when you’ll run out of food. You may adapt a craving for fried insects (who knows?) and you can always keep yourself warm but creating a fire with wood.

Ever wonder why some objects fall faster than others? Well it has to do with gravity for the most part. The force of gravity is causing the objects to fall of course, but if gravity is 9.8 m/s squared, then why doesn’t everything fall at the same speed? It is the force of attraction that causes some objects to fall faster than others. The larger the object is, the harder it will fall. Some people wonder why feathers float gently in the breeze instead of falling to the ground quickly, like a brick would. The reason being, the air resistance is much higher to the falling motion of the feather than it is to a brick. The air is actually an upward force of friction, acting against gravity and slowing down the rate at which the feather falls. The brick’s mass is much heavier than a feather’s and it is more compact together. Unlike a feather that allows air to seep through and use it’s upward force to keep it from falling at a high speed. The air resistance is what separates them. If you have ever wondered so much or had disbelief and that you wanted to see what would happen if there was no air resistance, using something like a vacuum is a good idea because it sucks air. If you dropped a brick and a feather into a vacuum, they would fall at the same speed.

One interesting fact is that if you took both a brick and a feather, and dropped them both on the moon, they would hit the ground at the same time because there is no air on the moon unfortunately. In fact, the moon may even move toward the falling object, though it would be very difficult to measure. If this experiment were to be done underwater, it would depend on the buoyancy of the object to see whether it would float or not.

One way to test out if the mass matters when dropping an object like a feather, or paper from above to see how it would land is to have a paper in one hand, and a book in another hand. Drop them at the same time and see which one lands first. The book will land first because of its mass and that it is less air resistant than the paper. Next put the paper on top of the book and drop it. You will see that the paper will land with the book. The paper gains mass because it is grouped together with the book so it becomes less air resistant. Just like if a bird fell straight down from the sky, it wouldn’t take less than 9.8 m/s for it to fall. A feather alone has a lower mass which allows it to give people a little brain work as to why it doesn’t fall like a heavier object.

Contrary to popular belief, gravitational force is not a force of contact. There are many things that fall with force from gravity without even being touched. For example, when a quarterback throws a football to a receiver, the ball drops from the air into the receiver’s hands or onto the ground. That is gravity that is pulling the football down back to earth. Another example of gravitational force is a person’s weight because it is the gravitational force acting on a body mass multiplied by the amount of gravity whether it is on Earth or on the Moon. For instance, my own body mass is 18.8 so if I multiply it with the formula W= mg, my weight on Earth will be 185 lbs. On the moon my weight would be 30.71 lbs. The gravity on the moon can be found by taking my weight of 30.71 on the moon divided by my mass of 18.8 and it will equal 1.63. There are different ways to play around with the equation to find each one.

A Tidal Force is also an effect of gravity. Gravity does not only effect objects, it also have an input on tides and the way they rise. The tides are caused because of the gravitational attraction between the Earth and the Moon and the Sun with the geometric relationship of where the Earth is located. The reason why tides are periodic is because of the Earth’s rotation. The times that tides occur are relative to the Earth’s rotation and the revolution of the moon around the Earth. If the moon did not move, tidal cycles would be 24 hours long instead of 24 hours and 50 minutes as it is. The reason why it would be 50 minutes off is because while the moon revolves once, it takes about 27 days and that adds 50 minutes to the cycle.

There are two factors that have an effect on tides. The Sun’s gravity is the second factor that has some control on the tides on the Earth’s surface. At certain times of the year, mainly in the Spring, the direction of the moon’s gravitational attraction is aligned with the Sun’s and at these times it produces the highest and lowest tides of the year. When the gravitational pull of the moon and Sun are at right angles to each other, the daily tidal variations on the Earth are at their least. These events are called neap tides and they occur during the first and last quarter of the moon.

Gravity is a force that draws any two objects on Earth to one another. The formula for gravity is G= 9.8 x 10m/s squared. Without Gravity on Earth everyone would be in the air or maybe even in outer space. Every time you jump or have anything released from the air, the Earth’s gravitational force brings it down.

It was first thought of in the 1600s when an apple fell onto English physicist and mathematician, Isaac Newton. Sir Isaac Newton started to question why the apple fell on his head and didn’t go up to the moon or stay in the air. The explanation for that is gravitational force. Gravitational force is when you take the masses of the two particles and divide it by the radius, which is the straight-line distance between the two particles, or objects and then multiply it by the gravity of the planet which is being measure on. He then went on to predict the forces of each matter and the function of both mass and distance. Newton made his theory public in the 1680s called the Theory of Universal Gravitation. The equation of  gravitational force gives us the magnitude of the force and since it is an attractive force, the particles will always be directed towards one another. Newton’s Law of Gravity states that every object has particles and each particle interact with one another. And since forces are vector quantities, the forces can either have a parallel or perpendicular direction for the two objects. In some objects like spheres the perpendicular force will cancel each one out so they would just seem as point particles to us and we would only have to worry about the net force between the two objects.

Another scientist, Albert Einstein, had an alternate theory of gravity part of the General Theory of Relativity, which was published in the early 1900s. He gave different explanations than Sir Isaac Newton did on the topic of gravity. Einstein didn’t believe in the force of gravity. He called it “a distortion in the shape of space-time.”  While basic physics states that if there are no external forces an object will travel only in the straightest possible line and that the objects will stay parallel and never meet, it has been proven by Newton’s theory that they sometimes will meet because of the attracting particles in the objects. So sometimes the object do end up colliding which seems pretty interesting. While Newton’s explanation for this is the law of attraction, Einstein agrees, but disagrees to the theory of gravity being a force and that it is a curve in space-time. Einstein’s explanation for two objects to meet is that due to the space-time that the objects are traveling on, the straightest possible line is now a spherical path so the two objects would meet on at a point because it is no longer a straight line.

Gravitation is the reason why the Earth and the other planets orbit around the sun and for keeping the moon orbiting around the Earth. Scientists have done studies which have shown that people keep a better balance with their eyes open or touching something than to have their eyes shut. This shows that gravity has an effect on our brains and allows us to perceive gravity’s direction through different senses. So if we were to keep our eyes shut and not try to keep a steady balance, gravity could send us straight to the ground.

Some people wonder whether or not there is gravity in space. The answer to that is yes, there is gravity in space even though it may not seem like it. If there was no gravity in space, the planets orbiting around the sun wouldn’t orbit properly around the sun and the same with the moon around the Earth. It is true, however, that gravity decreases with distance so there is less gravity in space than on Earth because of that. Many wonder why people float in space. The reason people seem weightless is because they are in a space where there is less gravity. The closer they get to Earth, the heavier they will feel and gravity will pull them back down.

In my blogs, I will be writing about gravity for the most part so you guys know how it works and are hopefully interested in what I write, I will be putting alot of time in to these so I hope you’ll like them. Take care.