If you’re new to this series, let me give you a small explanation of HENSE. HENSE stands for Home Educators who Never do Science Experiments. This growing population of home educators don’t do science experiments for a variety of reasons: they don’t really like science, experiments are messy and take to long and aren‘t worth it, especially if they don‘t work. But actually doing the experiment, is critical to learning the scientific method. In our last HENSE blog, we talked about scientific concoctions.
This time we will make the leap from Chemistry to Physical Science. Today we will just talk about Newton’s first Law of Motion: Inertia.
Inertia–Objects that are in motion tend to stay in motion and objects at rest tend to stay at rest UNLESS acted on by an unbalanced force. That’s the fancy way of saying that if you’re sitting still, you’ll stay sitting still until something forces you to move. If you’re moving, you’ll stay moving until something forces you to stop.
To make an Intertia Zoom Ball you’ll need:
Scissors
Two plastic soda bottles (1 liter size)
Two 12 foot pieces of string
Two plastic-ring six-pack holders
First take the soda bottles and cut the bottoms off. Tape the bottles together so that they form a kind of football shape. Next, thread the two strings through the necks of the bottle. Cut the six pack rings apart to form four two-loop handles.
If you yank the strings outward, the zoom ball goes flying. That yanking is the “unbalanced force” that causes the motion–otherwise it would stay at rest!
Here’s another experiment that will demonstrate the principle of inertia. . .
Make a tower of nickels–about 10-15 nickels will do. Then try to knock the tower down, one nickel at a time by flicking another nickel at the bottom of the tower. If you do it right, the bottom nickel will move, but the rest of the tower will stay in tact. Why? The bottom nickel was forced to move but the rest of the nickels were not. . .they are “staying at rest.”
Websites to explore Sir Isaac Newton and his 1st Law of Motion:
Science Monster
IMSA
The Physics Classroom
Bill Nye the Science Guy