Friday, August 26, 2011

Scientific Science

OOwww isn't summer just the best thing ever? It is usually warm and most people go on holidays and enjoy themselves :D My summer was pretty great too :D After a lot of traveling and long time pass I finally went into a basketball camp to improve my skills and get fit for the on coming year. I must admit I was kind of nervous at first because I thought it was going to be awful since I didn't know anyone but I figured out it was one of the best things ever. With the team we went to Zlatibor a place in Serbia and there we stayed or 10 days. During the days we had training in the morning usually and hour or two after we had breakfast at 8 and a training either at 4 or 6 which was really hard because that was usually when it was the warmest. Anyways, we ate healthy and ran 14 km per day which was probably my favorite thing to do since I love RUNNING! Dribbling, passing, skills, excersizing and shooting were the part we were most concentrated about. All of these fact have somehow something related in a way to science. In the next paragraph I will explain to you how these skills are related o science, so read on and enjoy! Maybe next time you will go and play basketball you will enjoy very much and actually remember what I told you and tell it on to your friends.

When I talk about basketball I usually think about a sport which I love and includes friendship. When my teacher assigned us the work that w3e had to write about something we did in the summer I automatically said basketball even though I had no idea how it was related to science. If I now think about how it is related probably the first thing that comes to mind would be gravity. Gravity is a part of one of the units we studied last year( Forces and Motion). Everything in the world has gravity and the Newton laws state something pretty similar to what I will talk about. So why does a ball bounce up and down when we dribble it? Think about elasticity, this is pretty similar only that it is called elastic collision. Collision is when something collides which would be to meet an other object or surface or any thing different in this case the floor. Inside all basketball balls there are particles which are so small not even we with the human eye can see them, they move around inside the ball with a huge velocity and this is why they don't float out of the basketball ball. Anyway, while dribbling the ball, the ball slightly gets pushed to the floor causing a smaller space for the particles to be in which pushes them upwards and with all the force from our hand and from the particles the ball can easily bounce right back to us. In this what I just explained, you can count the particles as the bosses of the basketball ball. The more the ball is inflated, the more speed it will have when you bounce it, you may have noticed that if you don't inflate it completely it won't bounce because all the particles have more space to be in and are spread which causes not such a good dribbling. When we were having training it was very important to have a ball which is medium inflated because if it is too much the speed will over take us and if it is badly inflated it will work to slow.




Now let's talk about free throws. You get free throws when you get fouled on, most people think they are pretty easy to make but actually they are more tricky then you think and this is because gravity is the main thing that stops most people from making the throw. To make sure you score you have to think about the aim because scientist have proven that while the ball is in the air gravity pulls it down by 9.8m/s² so until the ball reaches it goal it will decrease its height.  If you would graph how the basketball ball travels you would get a parabola shape which looks pretty much like:

Passing is also a very important part of them game, probably without this the game could not work. While passing a basketball, there are two forces acted upon it, actually there are 3 in my words, but logically explained only 2. These we will now call the x and y forces. The easiest way to remember these is by thinking of a graph. A graph has the y-axis going vertically, the x-axis on the other hand goes horizontally. Now, to get more precise, while passing the ball the y axis acts like gravity because it pulls the ball down and the x-axis will be our forward momentum making the ball travel forward. The 3rd force I was talking about was the strength of the push you give the ball. If you only throw it lightly it will most probably be dropped pretty soon because of the force of the gravity so one thing to remember is while you are passing, pass it with strength so the ball can resist against gravity! Now remember, all forces and motions are our friends because they make life good to discover and fun to play around with. If we didn't have them we either couldn't do anything. So after all, I enjoyed my summer a lot and hope you did too, i never thought i would say this, but now i realized that everything we do in life is scientific and if the world is not about science I have no clue what it is about ;)

My resources I used are these:
http://mrfizzix.com/basketball/index.htm]
http://www.worsleyschool.net/science/files/physicsof/basketball.html

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