Talk Like A Physicist

The 11th Annual Physics Fun Day at Knott’s Theme Park was on March 5th. Local students use Knott’s rollercoasters as a giant science lab with local educators joining together with Knott’s educational staff to create a variety of learning contests and games centered on the park’s thrill rides.

Almost all major theme parks have a physics day. Take a budding physicists to one of the theme parks on physics day – they will have a blast.

Here is a report that was filed on the recent Physics day at the Knotts Berry Farm.

BUENA PARK – Most classrooms don’t come equipped with hurtling roller coasters or flume rides to demonstrate scientific principles such as gravity or friction.

Instead, 8,000 middle and high school students from as far away as Las Vegas arrived at Knott’s Berry Farm on Thursday, packing accelerometers, protractors and stopwatches along with their cameras and sunglasses.

They spent the day calculating the height of steel towers and the angles of roller coaster loops, all while keeping their brains going with ample supplies of funnel cakes and French fries.

“It’s the best field trip so far,” said Karrissa Duncan, 12, a sixth-grader at St. Angela Merici School in Brea.

Senior Catherine Nguyen, 17, and three of her Westminster High School classmates scribbled numbers furiously underneath the Boomerang roller coaster.

“What we’re learning is we can apply actual physics to rides. They’re not just made-up numbers,” she said, adding some of the challenges handed them by their teacher required them to board rides to take speed and other measurements. “So it’s fun, too.”

That’s exactly what former Westminster High School science teacher Jim Pacelli had in mind when he approached Knott’s 11 years ago about holding a physics day. He didn’t come up with the idea, but wanted a location close to Orange County students.

His motivation was simple.

“No matter how many (physics) experiments we do in the classroom, some students are convinced it’s smoke and mirrors,” Pacelli said. So, he gathered a few other teachers together.

“We went through every ride they had in the park at the time, and thought, ‘How does physics apply?’” he said. Each year since, every corner of Knott’s Berry Farm has become a science workbook.

In addition, students competed to make the tallest towers from sheets of paper or tried to craft paper airplanes to fly through a hoop and onto a target.

Fountain Valley High School Senior Paula Nguyen, 17, took part in the competition to get extra credit from her teacher. Her plane came up short of the hoop, but did make a finely executed – though unintended – loop before it crashed.

“It did better than what I expected,” Nguyen said as she shrugged, acknowledging aeronautic skills were not her forté. “I thought it would just fall. But it made a loop, and that was pretty.”

Students work with their inclinometer to measure the height of Supreme Scream at Knott’s Berry Farm’s Physics Day.

A beautiful poster design from American Physical Society.

The poster was also sponsored by the American Association of Physics Teachers and by the Society of Physics Students.

A train that describes how one might travel through spacetime was discovered in the Bolivian desert by a physics teacher.

The old locomotive itself must have pushed the boundaries of space and time due to its mysterious location in the desert and its signs of old age. The unique feature of the train is the expression painted on the engine and signed by A. Einstein.

This equation not only answers the question of how gravity works, but it also describes black holes, gravity waves, bending of light, planetary motion, and the shape of the universe.

The observer on this particular day was Monica Witt, a physics teacher at Friends Seminary in New York City, who discovered this fascinating artifact while hiking through the Bolivian desert.

Source: Physics Central