Friendly Physics

Forces

So what is a force? A force is really just a push or a pull on an object. It occurs when two objects interact with each other. Forces can be contact forces, meaning that

Newton's Laws

Let’s forget the math today and focus on Newton’s Laws. Newton was a mathematician and physicist born in the 1600s. He existed, taught and studied well before many of ou

Projectile Motion - Part 2

However, we don’t always just move objects at a parallel to the ground. More often than not, we move them at an angle. Think about your field goal kickers on a football f

Projectile Motion - Part 1

I promised an exciting episode that would take us into a whole new dimension. Let’s start talking projectile motion → the movement of objects that break beyond just one

What Goes Up Must Come Down

The past few weeks we have moved on from talking about objects moving horizontally, back and forth, and started to talk about objects that move vertically, up and down W

Launching Upward

An important thing to keep in mind as we discuss upward vertical motion → we are talking about objects launching straight up into the air. Ideally, without wind or dispro

The Kinematic Formulas

Last week we listened to the start of a new idea. We expanded on motion and are now talking about up and down → vertical motion. We spent a lot of time getting accustome

Free Fall

We are going to spend the next episodes talking about TWO dimensional motion. UP & left, down & right. We are adding a whole new dimension to motion Before we do that,

Graphing Position, Velocity & Acceleration

We are wrapping up one dimensional motion today with all of the key ideas covered. We’ve talked about distance and displacement, speed and velocity and last week we talke

Acceleration

Let’s get to it. Acceleration is the rate of change of an object's velocity. It is how the velocity changes. When car companies brag about how quickly their vehicles go

Speed vs Velocity

How do we discuss HOW FAST an object moves? Let’s start with speed: SPEED is the rate at which an object covers ground. If you’re a math head like me: SPEED is distan

Scalars vs Vectors

If you didnt listen to my last episode on Distance vs Displacement - give that one a listen for a little bit of context on how we talk about movement. In the last episo

Distance vs Displacement

Let's start off by discussing the idea of movement. What is movement? How can someone move? Do we care about direction? Do we care how fast someone is going? If we r