OMg! ( Oh My Gravity!)

Our experiment for today dealt with mechanics. We used some cool instruments (if you may call them instruments) such as the air track and the glider. The principle behind the near frictionless surface of the surface of the air track is just easy to comprehend. The upward force that lifts the glider off the track causes the car to move in a seemingly frictionless surface. The only friction that the glider dealt with is the air friction which is not so strong compared to the friction that it may work against when in contact with the aluminum track. The mechanism of the instrument used is comparable with how the maglev train works only that it is the magnetic repulsion that lifts off the train in maglev and not the upward force of gushing air from a "electromechanical blower" that can be found in the air track. Anyway, the objective of our experiment is not about understanding how the air track works. Our real mission is to derive the value of the magnitude of acceleration due to gravity (g) empirically and compare it to the conventionally accepted value which is 9.8 m/s2. We also want to know the effect of differences of angle of inclination of the air-track to the motion of the glider as it slides down the air-track.

For this experiment, we used a ruler, stopwatch, marker, recording paper, a glider and the air-track. We prepared four different set-ups of the experiment corresponding to the degree of inclination of the air-track: flat (0°), 2°, 4°, and 6°. In each of the set-ups, we also assigned distances to be travelled by the glider. A recorder was assigned to record the time it took the glider to cover the distance measurements we assigned. For the set-up where the degree of inclination is zero, we recorded ten trials for each of the distance measurements. To jumpstart the motion of the glider, we used the force of the spring of a retractable ballpoint pen. In this way, we can make it sure that the force we exerted is constant in all of the trials. For the set-ups with the degree of inclination of 2, 4, and 6, we only had 5 trials for each of the distance measurement. Unlike the first set-up, we no longer used the spring of the ballpoint pen to jumpstart the motion of the glider because it readily slides down when it was laid in the inclined air-track.

With a first glance on the data we gathered, we did notice that the time it took the glider to cover the assigned distances gets shorter as the degree of the inclination increases. This means that the glider moves faster as the air-track went steeper.

The data that we got from the experiment will also be utilized to compute the acceleration of the glider along the air-track and the magnitude of the acceleration due to gravity. We will heavily rely on the Newton’s Second Law of motion in deriving the said quantities given by ∑F=ma. I can’t wait to see the results!