preview

Physics Of Bowling Essay

Good Essays

Physics Of Bowling

The one thing that interests me is bowling. I have been playing all my life and after a whole semester and a half of being in Mr. Fetter’s class, I realized that everything has physics in it. One night after going bowling with my girlfriend(s) I wondered why when I hit the first pin, only seven went down and thus I lost the game. So, I got on the Internet and found a lot of articles and web sites talking about the physics of bowling. A lot of the web sites were brief descriptions. A guy named Paul Durbin wrote many articles on physics. One of his articles he discussed was about bowling. He mentioned one thing we already went over this semester in physics class. But it seems to me that he neglected to mention other …show more content…

You may let go of the bowling ball at a constant speed, but its velocity is not constant because of the change in direction every instant. The ball's state of motion is changing. It’s accelerating! Now you can see why it is important to know the difference between speed and velocity, and why acceleration is defined as the rate of change of velocity, rather than speed. Acceleration is like velocity, its directional. If you were to change your arms speed or direction, or even both, you change velocity and you accelerate. Just remember acceleration = change of velocity/time interval.

The one thing that’s cool about pool is that wooden alley that’s always shiny. The alley is made out of fine wood and is usually shined up. The alley seems to be the friction that slows a ball down. Even when a single force is applied to an object, it is usually not the only force affecting the motion. This is because of friction. Friction is a force that always acts in a direction to oppose motion. When you let go of the ball one way, the air resistance is coming the opposite direction.
Let go of the bowling ball and you can see it in motion. If an object moves, the by virtue of that motion it is capable of doing work. It has energy in motion, or kinetic energy. The kinetic energy of an object depends on the mass of the object as well as its speed.

KE = ½mv².
When you let go of that bowling ball, you do work on it to give it speed to get that nice rotation. The

Get Access