Galileo’s Inclined Plane

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Galileo’s Inclined Plane Discussion: This experiment was devised by Galileo and refuted the Aristotelian thought of motion and at the same time demonstrated Galileo’s scientific method. Because of his difficulty calculating the time of a free-falling body, Galileo chose to use an inclined plane. The force of gravity on the inclined plane would be reduced, allowing more accurate calculations of time intervals. Upon his experimentation, he discovered that the distance traveled by the ball was directly proportional to the square of the time times the acceleration due to gravity when it was released from rest. [pic] As he tried his approach with inclined planes of different angles, he discovered that the acceleration changed. He asserted that as the angle of the inclined plane approached 90°, the acceleration approached our current value of g. Thus, he related acceleration due to gravity with the sin of the angle of the plane. a = g sin θ More importantly, he found that all bodies, regardless of weight, fall with the same uniform acceleration. The Experiment: [pic] Determining g on an Incline Purpose To use a motion detector to obtain the speed and acceleration of a cart rolling down an incline. To determine the free-fall acceleration g from a graph of acceleration vs. sine of track angle. • measure the acceleration of a rolling cart on an inclined plane with a motion detector; • change the angle of the incline and measure the acceleration for different angles; • determine how the acceleration depends on the angle and the gravitational acceleration Measuring 'g' experiment. The purpose of this experiment is to measure the acceleration due to gravity and to see if the effects of air resistance can be observed by dropping various balls and recording fall times.. Moment of Inertia The purpose of this experiment is to determine
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