When I was playing mustang baseball, one thing that I had always used to do was to try and balance a baseball bat on the tip of my finger. Initially I had thought it would be extremely difficult to do, but surprisingly, it was extremely easy. For a while after that, I had always believed that it was easy for me to do simply because I was very talented at it. However, when I saw that many other people could do it, I began to wonder why it was so easy, until this year in physics. The mass of the baseball bat is distributed such that most of the mass is at the top half of the bat, while the bottem half of the bat (the handle) is extremely light. I learned that because of this distribution of mass, the moment of inertia of the bat is very high, meaning that it is very hard for the bat to begin to rotate. Because of the high moment of inertia due to the majority of the mass being far away from the point of rotation, the end of the handle of the bat, the bat is extremely easy to balance on a person's finger if they balance it on the handle side.
No comments:
Post a Comment