11-7

November 5, 2008- In class today, we finished our lab and went over a few of the answers. Today there was not a daily question. We pretty much started to work on our labs when we entered the classroom. We have been working on the Force and Motion lab for the past two days and we were finally able to finish them today. In this lab we attached different masses to a string which was also attached to a little cart. We would measure the carts acceleration versus the force. Overall it was a pretty fun lab which is expected from Mr. Manning because he does create the best labs. Once we finished the lab we were to complete the observations and conclusions questions. It asked the normal questions, but one question in particular received a lot of attention. • Once we found our graph it showed is that the unit for our slope was N/m/s² • The lab tells us that a Newton is equal to • The slope means how much the cart weighs. After being taught this concept revealed that we had just learned Newton’s second law!!! I was grateful to know that Mr. Manning had just provided us with such a wealth of useful knowledge. Newton’s second law is the Law of Acceleration. It states that when an unbalanced force acts on a particle, the particle accelerates such that the product of the mass and the acceleration of the particle equal the unbalanced force The mathematical statement for the law is; If the sum of all the forces acing on the particle is less than or greater than 0, then the net force is equal to the mass of that particle times the acceleration of that particle. The equation is: ΣF= ma We did not have any homework tonight unless you did not finish the conclusion questions for the lab. Overall it was yet another great day in the physics lab with Mr. Manning.