Getting the Swing of Surface Gravity
Physics Education
2015-06-04 v1
Abstract
Sports are a popular and effective way to illustrate physics principles. Baseball in particular presents a number of opportunities to motivate student interest and teach concepts. Several articles have appeared in this journal on this topic, illustrating a wide variety of areas of physics. In addition, several websites and an entire book are available. In this paper we describe a student-designed project that illustrates the relative surface gravity on the Earth, Sun and other solar-system bodies using baseball. We describe the project and its results here as an example of a simple, fun, and student-driven use of baseball to illustrate an important physics principle.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1202.0794,
title = {Getting the Swing of Surface Gravity},
author = {Brian C. Thomas and Matthew Quick},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1202.0794},
year = {2015}
}