Astronauts have to contend with a number of unusual issues while living on the space station. Possibly the biggest difference between life up there and life down here is the apparent “weightlessness”: ...
Have you ever seen one of those roller coasters that shoots out of the station at an insanely high speed? These roller coasters don’t need to climb hills first to use gravitational potential energy—th ...
The movement of a pendulum is called simple harmonic motion: when moved from a starting position, the pendulum feels a restoring force proportional to how far it’s been moved. Put another way, it alwa ...
Friction is kind of a drag. Every time you push on something, friction pushes back. To get an object moving, you have to overcome the friction force first. If you’ve ever walked on pavement and sudden ...
If space is a vacuum—that is, if it contains absolutely nothing—then how does a rocket move? Doesn’t it need something to push against?Rockets can propel themselves through the nothingness of space be ...