{"id":285,"date":"2006-06-03T09:25:16","date_gmt":"2006-06-03T09:25:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2006\/06\/03\/outlaw-physics\/"},"modified":"2006-06-03T09:25:16","modified_gmt":"2006-06-03T09:25:16","slug":"outlaw-physics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/06\/03\/outlaw-physics\/","title":{"rendered":"Outlaw Physics"},"content":{"rendered":"

PZ notes<\/a> and article about a controversial physics demonstration<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

Every year, physics teacher David Lapp brings his Korean War era M-1 carbine to school, fires a shot into a block of wood and instructs his students to calculate the velocity of the bullet. <\/p>\n

It is a popular experiment at Mill Valley’s Tamalpais High School, where students are exposed to several unique stunts that Lapp performs in his five classes every year to illustrate inertia, velocity and other complex formulae. <\/p>\n

Turns out, it also may be illegal.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The legal problem is due to laws that were passed as an over-reaction to the high-profile school shooting incidents of the mid-1990’s. Which is a shame, because the “ballistic pendulum” experiment is a really cool example of physics in action. You can do it with low-velocity sping-powered projectile launchers (we sometimes do this lab in our intro class), but it’s just not the same.<\/p>\n

Of course, Lapp is a piker. Back in my<\/strong> day, we did this as a lab in college– every student in the class got to personally fire a .22 rifle into a block of wood, and calculate the speed of the bullet. We even let pre-meds<\/strong> pull the trigger in a class I TA’ed, and let me tell you, there are few things as funny as a room full of tightly wound future doctors being startled by a gun going off (I warned them, but they didn’t believe me…).<\/p>\n

It’s a great demonstration, and it’ll be a real shame if the experiment gets outlawed due to parental paranoia.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

PZ notes and article about a controversial physics demonstration: Every year, physics teacher David Lapp brings his Korean War era M-1 carbine to school, fires a shot into a block of wood and instructs his students to calculate the velocity of the bullet. It is a popular experiment at Mill Valley’s Tamalpais High School, where… Continue reading Outlaw Physics<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-285","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-in_the_news","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/285","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=285"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/285\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=285"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=285"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=285"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}