You might not think that putting a plate of cookies on top of your car is the best place for a ten minute car ride across town.  However, from a physics point of view, there is no problem transporting sweets this way!  Through this experiment I demonstrated that the force required to overcome the coefficient of friction between the plate and the roof of the car is greater than:

- the force of accelerating to 45 mph (slowly, I’m not a crazy driver!!),  

- the force of decelerating to stop at a stop light.   

- the centripetal force resulting from driving around curves in the road across town.  

 Because no resultant force acted on the plate of cookies during this drive, Newton’s first law of motion states that the plate would not move.   That may be true, but obviously this isn’t the correct way to transport cookies is it?  The story here is that I rested the plate on top of my car’s roof, while I got my daughter correctly in her seat, and my car at the time was a bit too tall for me to see on the top of it.  The cookies actually did not fall off the car in that 10 minute drive!  Since this photo, you’ll be glad to know that I have never driven with cookies on the roof again. 

This experience reminds me why math and physics is important! 

Math is so important for many areas of life - whether it is working out how much someone gets paid, so they have enough to pay for groceries, bills and mortgage, this is critical to avoid going into debt. Or whether it is calculating how much charge a battery can give, so you don’t run out of energy and lose power.  Imagine if you were on a solar-powered plane, and the batteries ran out of energy.  It would be really important that the engineers who designed the battery on board correctly sized the battery, for use when clouds block the sun - otherwise the plane could fall out of the sky! 

Physics is so important, for example as you think about how an outlet is wired.  If a thin wire is used in the place of a thick wire, the resistance of the thin wire is inversely proportional to the area of the thick wire.  Then if we remember from Physics that the power dissipated in a resistor is equal to the square of the current times the resistance, the power and heat dissipated increases proportionally to the resistance. Therefore if a wire half the size it should be is used, when a large current is drawn, it will dissipate twice the power and heat than the right sized wire would.  This leads to overheating of wires, melting of insulation and a potential fire!   As an engineer, I have unfortunately seen this happen.  It is therefore so important to choose the correct size wire! 

Yes, math and physics calculations need to be correct to avoid serious issues like going into debt, or seeing electrical fires because of the laws of physics not being respected. But let’s pivot and think about what a joy it is to use math and physics skills for the benefit of the world!  There are some seriously cool and important topics that need to be solved.  How could you solve the problem of getting more energy out of nuclear fusion than has to be put in?  As the economy becomes more electric, how can we get batteries that use fewer rare earth materials, and become cheaper and safer? This one is a bit more gross - can we really distill sewage to make jet fuel and power airplanes? 

By excelling in math and physics, you could find a really interesting job, and resolve some of the world’s challenging problems.  I would love to help you through tutoring in math and physics!