Science Methods II - Week 3

 

Lab:

              There was no lab this week.

Lecture:

In lecture today we continued to talk about friction. We went over our friction discussion from last week and brought it into our new discussion about gravity. We talked about friction in relation to air resistance and how some objects fall at different rates because of it. Most objects, however, fall at the same rate, because they cut through the air particles rather than being able to catch them. We continued this point and watched a video of a bowling ball and feathers falling with and without air resistance. We talked about how feathers generate a lot more frictional force because their surface area and weight catches more air particles and generates more friction.

Textbook Reading:         

From the textbook I learned that a force is really, “A push or pull upon an object resulting from the object’s interaction with another object.” I also learned about static friction, and how it prevents objects from moving. I learned more about how if objects have more mass than they require more force to be moved. A lot of this chapter in the textbook were things we discussed last week in lecture, but this week’s lecture helped me make sense of how friction can stop things from moving, especially in the air. This just leaves me with the question of how can we increase or decrease static friction, and what is the extreme of it? How can we make something have so much static friction that it could, for example, almost stick upside down? I am curious about how static friction works, and how we can see it in action.