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Throughout the year we'll hear from eight bloggers as they share about their family's time in the brand-new Riley Children’s Health Sports Legends Experience® and how it inspires them to explore these sports back at home.
This post was written by Children's Museum Blog Ambassadors Katie and Luis Ruvalcaba. Follow their posts on the blog or follow them @ruvalcademy on Instagram and Facebook.
Physics is not a topic that most homeschool moms really looking forward to delving into with their kids. There’s a lot of calculus involved and many of us are just getting into advanced algebra with our kids, if that. Just like eating an elephant, you have to take education in the sciences one bite at a time. But introducing your kids to Newton’s laws can be less intimidating than elephant consumption if you incorporate them into America’s favorite pastime—baseball!—and hopefully you’ll avoid the foul taste in your mouth, too. (See what I did there?)
Sir Issac Newton was a scientist of the 16th and 17th century with absolutely incredible hair and a propensity to sleep in unorthodox locations. The mythology goes that Newton came up with the law of gravity when an apple fell from a tree onto his snoozing head below. In addition to “discovering” gravity, Newton is credited with a good portion of modern physics. His three laws form the backbone of any good education in the study of motion. Let's take a look at them, and check out their applications in baseball!
But first—Gravity.
Before we get into the laws of motion, it's important we're all on the same page with gravity. Gravity is the force that pulls all objects toward the earth. Or to put it simply—what goes up must come down. On the surface of planet Earth things don’t just float away. In fact, without using technology to overcome gravity, even the fastest items will eventually be pulled to the ground. Think of playing baseball with your uncoordinated mother. No matter how awesome your throw is, she’s probably going to miss that catch. The ball doesn’t keep going forever down your street though. Gravity pulls it to the ground so that she can walk over and pick it up before tossing it back to you and making a lame excuse about the sun being in her eyes.
Now let's talk about the laws of motion.
The first law is simple: An object at rest will stay at rest until acted upon by an outside force. This might seem obvious, but no matter how long you stand and stare at the Wiese Field Baseball Experience, it's never going to play with itself. The balls and bats are not going to throw or swing themselves. If they were just laying there when you came up, they are going to stay laying there until someone or some thing puts them in motion. Until you realize this law, you’re not playing baseball—you’re just watching.
The second law is the other side of that coin: An object in motion will stay in motion until acted upon by an outside force. What does THAT mean? Well it's pretty simple. When you throw a ball it's going to keep going until you catch it, hit it, or gravity brings it to the ground.
The most fun example of this law in baseball is the greatest of all baseball moments (and the basis of every Tide ad since the dawn of time)—sliding into home. A kid can stop running and slide across the ground and he will keep going toward home until friction slows him to a stop, hopefully not before his foot hits the plate. Friction is a fancy word for rubbing. As a body rubs along the ground, some of the energy that pushed him through slide is pushed into the surface of the earth. As that energy is transferred into the ground, it's no longer fueling the forward motion of the kid. Less energy means less speed. Watch Micah demonstrate a slide so you can see how he gradually slows down as friction acts upon him. The smoother a surface is, the less friction will be involved. Think how much easier it is to slide on a hardwood floor in socks than it is to slide on carpet in sneakers. So, if you were able to completely remove friction from the situation, a kid sliding into home would keep sliding all the way out the back stop, down the street, never to be seen again. This is the number one reason we don’t play baseball on ice. That and it would make the post-game sno-cones less desirable. (Learn more about friction in this recent Saturday Science: Puck Power.)
The last law Newton proposed is a little harder to spot: For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. When a batter connects with a ball and sends it flying into the outfield everyone can see the motion of the ball going forward, but only one guy can feel the equal and opposite reaction. It's the guy at bat. The same force that is applied to the ball by the bat is also applied to the bat by the ball. The batter will feel this energy in his arms as she swings, but the crowd might not see it.
To help us show this to you, Merritt agreed to take a swing with a tee. See how, in slow motion, the tee first goes forward with the ball and then snaps back? Thinking of this as the forward motion of the ball and a visual representation of it's equal-opposite reaction. The tee swings forward then back.
Try it yourself!
To feel Newton’s third law for yourself you're going to have to head to the sports experience and take a swing. Make sure you’re feeling for that force in your arms when you connect with your first pitch. Just as hard as you lay into that ball, the ball is going to push back into you. The difference is, you're much bigger than the ball, so a force that sends the ball sailing will really just tingle your muscles a bit.
I hope you followed all that, but if you didn’t its ok! Baseball is a great way to get your body in motion even before you understand all the laws the govern a body in motion.
