projectile motion

If you want to be a Major League Baseball pitcher, you need to be able to throw a ball really fast—like 85 to 100 miles per hour. The faster the pitch, the less time a batter has to react…

There are three forces acting on the debris. First, there's the downward-pulling gravitational force (Fg) due to the interaction with the Earth. This force depends on both the mass (m) of…

If you drop an object, it will fall. It's a motion that we’ve all seen hundreds of times. We’ve also all seen plenty of the moon, which makes one complete orbit around our planet every 27.3…

I'm a sucker for interesting online games that don't have a score or even a goal. In this case, it's a cartoon space simulator to promote the book What If? 2, by Randall Munroe, the author…

A few weeks ago, Sports Illustrated tweeted this video of Golden State Warriors point guard Steph Curry that instantly went viral. It shows him taking a shot at the basket—from the far side…

So, here’s the obvious next question: Is kinetic energy also conserved, just like momentum is conserved? The answer is: sometimes. For some collisions that we call "elastic collisions," both…

Sometimes the universe is just too complicated to analyze.Heck, if you take a tennis ball and toss it across the room, even that is practically too complicated. After it leaves your hand,…

This graph says that the vertical position of the rocket increases by a (nearly) constant amount from one frame to the next. In physics, we call that "constant velocity." Since this is a…

The time it takes for Drake to move in the vertical direction is the exact same time it takes for him to move horizontally. This means that I can use the horizontal motion to calculate the…

The important thing is that this is the equation of a parabola. Looking back at the vertical position data from the video, it at least seems fairly parabolic. Even better, the coefficient in…