Today I was EXTREMELY bored….so I was lying around thinking, WHAT ON EARTH SHOULD I DO MY PHYSICS BLOG ON? Well, while I was wandering around my house I found some little hand sanitizers with rubber cases around them so that you can attach them to your bag. I decided to start spinning the sanitizers around in circles because I had nothing better to do. To my amazement, I realized that I was witnessing circular motion right in front of my eyes! In physics we learned that centripetal acceleration is equal to the velocity squared divided by radius. Because the hand sanitizer holder thing has such a small radius, it probably has a very large linear acceleration. Even if the sanitizer were travelling at constant velocity, it would be accelerating because it is changing direction. We also learned that centripetal force is equal to the mass times the centripetal acceleration. The sanitizer has a small mass so it definitely will not have as much centripetal force as a ball. Yay for physics! J
