Blog Post #3- Energy!

All About Energy-

Energy- is it what makes your car move? Is it what’s in your energy drink? Is it in my lamp? The truth is I don’t know all of the answers to these questions, but am sure to get a lot of information on what energy really is this week in Physics. Before we started digging into what energy means in class, we all wrote down a few things we knew, thought, or remembered about energy. We came up with a whole range of ideas from “caffeine” to “E=mc².” Here are a few of my ideas-

• Potential
• Mechanical
• Light
• Sound

I took Physics last year, so I tried to rack my brain for as many types of energy, formulas, terms and qualities that I could remember. I honestly don’t remember as much as I thought, but am confident my memory will be refreshed once we start discussing energy this week. Though I do slightly worry that I will be expected to know what I’m talking about more than others because they haven’t taken Physics before, and that I won’t remember everything and be as confused as the rest and be hard on myself about it. The experiments we did in class helped to bring back some memory, and I was able to ask questions and come up with ideas on the energy and it’s transfers and such during discussion, which made me excited and a little more confident because usually I have little idea what is going on and do my best to put in input, so it was nice for a change. 😊

Questions, Conclusions, Ideas, and More Questions-

Though I know the basics of energy, I have to know, are there more types of energy that I haven’t learned about? What are they? How is this 9th grade Physics class going to be different from my 8th grade Physics class? Will it be more complex version that builds on the basics I learned in 8th grade? We did a certain activity in class this week where we dropped a basketball from a certain height and studied its bouncing. I knew energy was present because it was obviously moving and not staying in one spot. But when was the energy kinetic and where was it potential? At what exact point does it switch? Is there potential energy is a non-moving object as well? I think that when the basketball is falling that is kinetic energy, but when it bounces up it is storing energy for its next drop and therefore has potential. Then we started to discuss, and others had ideas that haven’t even crossed my mind, leading me to more questions and more thinking. Sound energy was brought up, and I started thinking about sound waves. When the basketball hits the floor, is some energy transferred into the ground prouducing a sound wave to which we hear the sound? Many people said that the sound energy was nonexistent in the basketball as it bounced back up, saying it went into the air or the ground. If it went into the air, wouldn’t we have heard an echo? If it went into the ground, how does that affect the ground, and did the ground transfer energy back? If there is energy transferred back into the basketball is it potential or kinetic? If it is potential when does it turn to kinetic? And finally, where did the basketball get the sound energy from, (internal?) and how is it going to get it back, because the ball makes a sound every time it hits the ground? As you can tell my head is swimming with questions… hopefully so many answers this week to come! Gotta love science! ❤️