Luis C Colon Collazo: Physics

At the beginning of the semester I was really motivated to take this physics class. I always make myself a lot of questions about many things in life. How things work or why that thing happened are some examples of those. With the knowledge acquired in this few months of class I have been able to answer a few of those questions.  During my life I have been a big fan of cars, I loved everything related to them from the acceleration, handling, braking and even the ability to stay stable during curved. Everything of the performance of the vehicle can be known using physics. By doing test on them you can actually improved in many ways their performance. When we think about performance in a vehicle, speed is often and attribute that comes to our minds.  Drag force and horsepower are the most important factors influencing the speed of a performance vehicle. Drag force is equal to: (1/2)Crav^2 being the C= coefficient of friction, r= density of air, a= area and v= Velocity in the drag formula. The c and r does not change so that leaves the designer to work with the designed of the vehicle. They usually work with lowering the rooflines, and angling all body surfaces away from the upcoming drag force. In the other side horsepower measures how much force the engine can apply to car in a given amount of time. Horsepower is measured in Watts and 1 horsepower is equivalent to 746watts. One thing I was always questioning myself was how the brakes system work. Because to me was very impressive to think that we only put a little amount of force pressing the brake pedal and it makes a huge amount of force to make the car stop in a few seconds only. In class I learn more of how this works and it answer my long time questions. The force from the pedal is multiplied and translated to hydraulic fluid pressure and that way the car had enough force exerted to the brake pads to make it stop. The automotive industry has come a long way since the first engine was built and put into a car, but the perfect car is still a long way off, we still have many more years of working with physics to improve the way in which our automobiles work.  

Physics to me is one of the most important sciences if not the most important.  With it, we can answer a very large amount of question about things we see and go through in our lives. Is very difference between when people see physics from the outside and when other people like us in the class that actually learned physics, know the equations to help solved those things we normally make questions like “how those that work?” or “why? is it like that”.  Learning physics these semester have been pretty awesome, I would make my best efforts to finish the class with a good grade and to learn more in the last part of the semester.