Physics and beyond 2011-2012

 

Who are we?

“Physics and beyond” group, whose name is inspired from the titol of the book of Heinsenberg ( one of the founding fathers of quantum mechanics ) it’s the group of “smallest” teenagers of “Giovani per la scienza” Association and it’s formed every year with teenagers of first and second class that meet every wednesday from 13.30 to 15.30 at the ITIS Ferraris, where GpS have a classroom as the operational headquarter.

This year we looked back at some of the discoveries made by great scientists like Galileo, Newton, Einstein in order to reason about formulas , not memorize, this follows us to understand the steps that have been made to arrive at the formulas that we use during the lessons and that will subsequently apllied at the laboratory. The meeting takes place in the following way: introduce a topic, a question arises in the center of the debate and starting from it date back to the path made by the people who invented or discovered the formulas, this allows us to understand  where they originate and why of certain passages, when we get the solution ( led by prof Bianca Ferrari and older boys, Fabio Rossi, Davide Artesiano and Cristian Genta ) we focus on trascription in mathematical language. This year we have focused particurarly on motions ( constant velocity, constant acceleration circular ), the electrical charges and electricity electromagnetism and we started optics. It is our custom to reward those who distinguisted himself for his intelligence and reasoming electing scientist of the day. Why we young people frequenting this group? – Because we can make more use of the laboratories doing more complex experiments. – Because it is our custom to mark the presences and not the absences, and this makes us feel that’s our choise in our free time. For whoever is doing it for love of physics and makes it freely. With  the passage of time has set in motion a mechanism that we can define natural skimming, at the beginning the group was larger and with the passage of the lessons were only those who are most passionate and involved with great constancy.
Our peculiarity is the team spirit that allows us many times to get to the solution of the problems proposed with the help of thougts and assumptions made by other conrades.

Exemples of topics covered

If two act together with two opposing forces, why the forces do not cancel? The forces cancel only if they are applied in an opposite manner to one  and the same body on a same straight line, the forces do not cancel when they’re applied to different bodies. We talked about Galileo and his discoveries, we paused to discuss the inclined plane and the acceleration undergone by a body in the case is slid over it. Through an experiment on a plane created by some guys in the other group, we noticed that the body accelerates because travel longer distances ( up )  different in equal times, distances increased as the hand that once floued. Speaking of speed ( distance traveled by a body in a given time ), we can say that by dividing the distance traveled by the time we derived the avarage speed that is constant only in uniform rectilinear motion. Analyzing the triangles we faced “sine, cosine and tangent”. The sine is defined as the ratio between the lenght of the catheter opposite to the angle and the hypoteneuse. The cosine is the ratio between the lenghts of the catheter adjacent to the angle and the hypoteneuse. The tangent is the ratio between the catheter opposite and the catheter adjacent to the angle. We have studied the two basic functions of mathematical analysis, integrals and derivatives. We have addressed the use of the derivatives in order to determine the instantaneous speed. We  studied the integrals to determine th space path that corresponds to the space underlying the graph of velocity versus time.