Egg Drop

As a way to observe momentum, my classmates were divided into groups that had to drop eggs without breaking them as they landed on either the road or the sidewalk. In order to prevent the egg from being harmed, my group used three car sponges, a rubber band, and rope to enclose it. A hole was cut in the middle sponge as a place for the egg. On Wednesday, one of my group members dropped it from the designated area and I retrieved it from the road. A few moments later, I discovered that my group's egg survived its fall. Basically, the egg did not crack because its enclosure increased its contact time with the road. As a result, the average force on the egg decreased because the sponges absorbed some of the egg's force.

More Momentum Moments

 

Impulse often demonstrates the impact of a force on an object during a certain period of time based on the product of the object's mass and velocity, which is the definition of momentum. The average force on the object changes due to contact time. When an object falls straight to the ground, the contact time between them is small so the object feels a large amount of impact by the force. In order to reduce the amount of impact between the objects, the contact time between them must increase. In these two photographs, a bear falls on the floor and then on a pillow. Due to the pillow, the average force of the ground has less of an impact on the bear because the force distributes itself over a longer period of time.

Conservation

According to a concept called conservation of momentum, momentum is like matter in the sense that it cannot be formed or destroyed out of nowhere. During a collision in a closed system, the momentum of each object in the system is equal and opposite of each other. If the momentum of one object is 4 kg*m/s, the momentum of the other object would be -4 kg*m/s. As seen in these photographs, a pair of remote controls collided into each other. When the objects push on each other, their final positions are practically mirrors of one another. In this instance, objects with the same mass and the same change in velocity will have the same magnitude of momentum.

Comparing Momentum

 

 

By definition, linear momentum is a vector that is the product of the object's mass and its velocity. The object also moves in a straight line in order for the momentum to be linear. The SI unit for the quantity is kg * m/s. In the photograph on the top right corner, the pen featured on the top left was thrown at the package of crackers. In the photograph on the bottom right corner, the tape measurer seen in the bottom left was thrown. I threw each item at the same velocity. However, the crackers traveled farther when the tape measurer was thrown at it. This is due to the fact that the tape measurer has more mass than the pen. Since the objects have different masses, the momenta of the objects are not the same even though both had the same speed.