All About Physics

Welcome to the OK Let's Learn Podcast. This is two podcasts in one. One where we

dive into tons of different books and stories. And one where we just dive into

tons of different topics. My name is Kevin O'Keefe. So today OK let's learn all

about physics. Yes that topic in science that when my generation was growing up

we didn't get until we were 18 years old senior in high school. Now some schools in

Jersey have actually flipped it in the last 20 years or so where physics is actually the first year

your freshman year in high school. But here's the point. Too often this subject is looked upon as

no out of my reach. Too hard, too difficult. No I can't learn this. I can't understand it.

And I get it. But what I'm after here is to show you how fascinating how interesting and yes

you can get into it. So we will dive into all the different branches of science in future episodes.

This one is an overarching look at what physics is all about. But before we go into physics

I'm a big believer that right up front when kids are going to school at an early age they need

to understand what every subject is all about and don't just take it for granted that every student

understands. I mean why do we learn language arts? Why do we have math? Why are we learning math?

Why? What is social studies? Why do we have social studies? And of course what is science?

So let's just back up and go through briefly. Language arts, it's all about words.

It's our language how we use words. We got to read words, we got to write words, and we got to

learn to speak and understand words. Pretty important right? Well we do that through stories,

books, poems, essays. They all live inside language arts and language arts we used to call it English.

But it's so interesting. Math, it's all about numbers. Yes patterns, quantities, understanding

numbers. If you want to measure something, you want to count something, you want to build something,

you want to compare something. Math is what you use. It's a tool to help you in all the other

subjects. I would argue math goes across almost everything. It's a huge tool and too often,

again we look at it as something that no, no I'm no good at math. Get that out of your head.

Social studies, it's a story of people. It's all about people. Yes, history, government,

cultures, how we all get along. So questions like who lived before us, how did our countries begin,

how did we decide ultimately where we lived in different places around the world, and how we

tackling future questions as to how we will get along, how we will survive, how we will be able

to be productive in our world. And this is important. Social studies, when we talk about people,

it's about the story, our story, because science, the last pillar of the four basic subjects that

we learn right through elementary school and for the rest of our lives, science is the study of

the natural world and the natural world includes us understanding us and everything around us.

Why is the sky blue? How come plants grow? What are plants? Why does lightning flash? And yes,

how does our body work? Now I think science more than any of the other four core subjects is all

about why. And in science, it's really about asking these questions and then testing these ideas

we have to find the answers. You might say that science is like our way of becoming detectives

figuring it out. And it started with why since the beginning of time and we're still asking the

questions why. So we observe, when I say we, scientists observe the world, we ask questions and we

run experiments to see what is really happening. But science is got a lot of different branches,

a lot of different parts. So if you think of science as just basically the tree, the different

branches of science, biology, you study living things, earth science, you study the planet, the

actual physical planet, the rocks, weather, oceans, earthquakes, chemistry, you study what things

are made of and how substances mix and change. So again, chemistry, what are things made of,

earth, study the earth, biology, you study living things, plants, animals, people. And then finally,

this is what our podcast episodes about the other branch, the fourth major branch of science

is physics. And this branch of science really connects all the other three. So what is it? Physics

is the science that answers this big question. How does the universe work? Not just the stars in

galaxy, but everything around us. The ball in our hands, why it drops, the car that's driving

down the street. Why does it go forward? The light in our room, why is it turning on? What is it?

Even the phone or the computer playing this podcast. How is it that you can hear my voice?

All across the other side of the planet. Physics is like an instruction manual for everything that's

around us. The simple definition is it's the study of matter, energy, motion, and the forces that

control them. Well, that's a big mouthful. If you needed to put something into just a few words,

like we said before, earth science, study the earth, biology, study of living things, chemistry,

study of what things are made of and physics, study of how those things move.

Now to back up a second, we literally talked about the definition being yes,

it's the study of matter, energy, motion, and the forces that control them. So let's dive into

each piece matter. It's everything around us. It comes in three phases, liquids, solids,

gases. Everything that's around us that we can touch, hold, or see is made up of tiny building

blocks called atoms. Talk about them being small. If the atom was the size of a marble,

us, a one human being would be the size of the entire earth. That's how small it is. Well,

democratists who was a Greek philosopher prior to Jesus Christ being born, 400 BC. He had an idea.

He kept saying, you know what, if we kept cutting something smaller and smaller, eventually,

we would reach a piece so tiny that it couldn't be cut anymore. And he called these pieces,

atoms. In Greek, that means uncuttable. So for over 2000 years, scientists tried to prove

that atoms really exist. And yes, we did come to that understanding.

Atoms are fascinating. Definitely a future episode, but they powered everything that we came to

be able to leverage in terms of tons of different industries, whether you're talking about how to

produce energy, how to make electricity, how to take care of our body, everything. The second

piece of physics, motion, why things move? Motion is simply when something moves from one place

to another. A baseball flying through the air, bicycle rolling down the street, even the earth,

moving around the sun. For most of human history, people didn't understand it. It seems basic,

but then a man called Isaac Newton in the 1600s did it actually fall on his head, hit his head,

or maybe, but more likely that yes, he just saw it fall from a tree. And when he observed this,

again, this is the foundation of science, before you test a theory, a smart guess, you have to

observe something. And after he observed it coming down, what he said to himself was, wait a minute.

How come it just doesn't fall? It comes straight down. Why is it doesn't wind its way over and

just kind of stop and mid-air and then just again fall down? Why is it that it doesn't go up?

You know, all these questions, it just goes straight to the ground. And he wondered if the same

force pulling the apple down was also pulling the moon towards the earth. That question led him

to discover the laws of motion and gravity. And he explained that all these objects moved in

predictable ways. So if you roll a ball across the floor, it slows down because of something called

friction. Friction is, again, from my younger members of the audience, you have to picture,

while if you've got a smooth surface, that ball is going to move really quickly. There's nothing

holding it back. But if you've got sand and a lot of bumps in the road, that ball is not going to

move as quickly. That's called friction. If there's no friction, no rubbing, no air, no resistance,

that ball will keep rolling forever. That idea became one of the most famous principles in science.

Objects in motion stay in motion unless something stops them. So his discoveries helped

engineers design everything from bridges to roller coasters to rockets. Even today,

when a spaceship goes up into the sky, they still use Newton's law of motions. And you wonder

why this gentleman is so famous. The third part of physics that we talked about forces,

they call these the pushes and pulls and it's funny. I'm having flashbacks here. I had a good

physics teacher, Mr. Twiliger, shout out to you. I hope you're still out there. I had to look you up

one day. But as much as he was a good teacher, I just never dived into it. It was just senior

year in high school. There's so many other things going on. And I just wish I had learned more.

But what I do remember about Mr. Twiliger, God bless you. If you weren't listening,

if you were talking when he was talking, he would point you out and he would throw that eraser

right at you. Now I'm talking about an eraser, which is a chalkboard eraser. No whiteboards,

no Expo markers. Actually, that could have heard if we got an Expo marker coming at you. But

if that eraser ended up hitting you, you got that chalk dust flying all over the place.

It was a good time. And all these topics that I'm bringing up are I'm having flashbacks.

So the forces, it's the push or the pull. When you push open a door, that's a force. When gravity

pulls you towards the ground, that's a force. When a magnet pulls a paperclip, that's a force.

It's one of the most important topics in physics. And yes, the most important force is gravity.

Gravity keeps us our feet on the ground as we talked about before with Newton. It's also what

makes rivers flow downhill. It's what keeps the moon circling earth and the planet circling the

sun. You talk about something that's important to understand. Without gravity, everything would

float away. Yes, like astronauts in space. So Newton helped explain that gravity existed,

but hundreds of years later, another scientist came along and he realized that gravity was even

stranger than people thought. Oh, yeah, you may know him. His name is Albert Einstein. He discovered

that gravity just isn't a pulling force. It happens because mass bends space itself. A

helpful way to imagine this is to picture a bowling ball sitting on a trampoline. The trampoline

sinks under the weight. Now imagine rolling a marble across that trampoline. The marble will

curve towards the bowling ball. That's a little bit like how gravity works in space. Einstein's

discoveries change physics forever and help us understand things like black holes in the expansion

of the universe. But boy, that's not here for us to discuss now. Talk about something that you

could have a lifetime trying to figure out. And that's Einstein's theory of relativity.

But let's just stop here and understand that one part of physics again is matter. The next part

is motion. The third part is forces. And now let's talk about energy. This is the ability to make

everything happen. It's the ability to do work or cause change. So much of our society today is

built off of harnessing energy. The caveman and cavewomen realize this with fire. We were able to

control fire as a species. And this changed everything. You can feel the energy coming from fire.

You can feel the energy that hits you when the sun shines right in your face.

Energy is also indicative of when you eat food, your body turns that food into energy when a

light bulb globes. And, excuse me, when a light bulb tries to say that three times, when a light

bulb glows, electricity becomes light energy. When the sun warms the earth, like I just said,

this is called solar energy. Energy can change forms, but one of the most important discoveries

in physics is this. That energy cannot be created. And it can't be destroyed. It can only change

form. This idea is called the law of conservation of energy. That discovery helped lead to some of

the biggest technologies in our history. We ended up making electric grids, the power plants,

batteries, solar panels, engines, everything from your refrigerator to your car,

this depends on understanding energy. And if the, I would argue, the most underrated and least

understood part of physics, but it's the most fascinating part. So to wrap up our podcast about

everything about physics, we got to talk about things that people experience every day,

five real life examples that explains why physics matters. And yes, my younger audience out there,

this is how you can get into physics. Number one, you want to explain why rockets reach space?

You want to help rockets get to space? Well, physics, like I've talked about,

it explains gravity, motion, energy, everything that you need to leave earth. When rockets launch,

they push gases downward at a high speed. That force pushes the rocket upward that follows the

laws discovered by Isaac Newton. Those same laws help engineers build space graphs,

like the ones that are going up right now with SpaceX. And you talk about something fascinating.

Can you have a rocket that can bring us to space that can take off like an airplane today and land,

like an airplane today and just use that airplane another few hours later and let's go off into

space again. That's what's happening now. Talk about something fascinating. Number two, how about

saving lives? How about just simply being able to figure out what's inside our bodies? Well,

physics helped create these MRI machines, these MRI scanners. They use magnets and radio waves

to take pictures of what's inside us. Talk about important. Number three,

how about me talking to you right now? We've mentioned this beginning with radios,

beginning with TVs. Go right down the line, the internet. How is it that this phone can actually

talk to you on the other side of the planet? Well, it's all about the study of electricity,

magnetism, and yes, the electromagnetic spectrum. You can go back to my previous episode on this.

Scientists learn through physics that energy moves through tiny circuits and radio waves.

Yes, one of those waves on the electromagnetic spectrum radio waves are lights and they learn that

these waves can carry information through the air. How about that? It was through all this that

now you're hearing my voice. Number four, how about bridges? They don't collapse. You know why

that don't come? Because we understand physics. It taught us that forces the pushing and the pulling

and the weights. They design bridges, engineers, so they can calculate exactly how much weight and

stress a structure can handle. So if it's the little bridge in your town that goes over a stream

or if it's the huge golden gate bridge, the George Washington bridge over the Hudson River,

we can have physics that we can thank for making this reality. And number five,

why is it that planes can fly? Physics explains it. It explains lift the force that pushes an

airplane upward when air moves faster over the curved top of a wing. Then under it, that pressure

changes and the wing is pushed upward. Scientists understood this. Engineers were able to design

airplanes like the huge Boeing 747s that we have out here now that can carry hundreds of people

across oceans. Think about it. I make sense why birds could fly. You don't have that much weight,

but all that weight that you could actually get up in the air and fly across oceans

without physics traveling through the air would not exist. Friends, thanks for staying with me

on this journey as an introduction to all about physics. I hope you enjoyed it. Reach out to me

at kevmok21 at gmail.com. Request for future episodes, a community that we've established on

Facebook. It's called okay. Let's learn the links are in the podcast description notes.

As I've always mentioned, love those ratings on Apple podcast. Any reviews that you could throw

out there would be appreciated. So until next time, have fun and keep learning.