PHYS 1010

Welcome to my Physics 1010 page! Here you will see some of my work and progress in the class named Conceptual Physics! I hope you enjoy the material presented!

Signature Assignment Reflective Essay

For most Gen-Ed classes here at SLCC (Salt Lake Community College), we are required to do a “signature assignment”. This means we do a large assignment that takes different things that we learned throughout the course and plugs them into one assignment for us to do. Below you will find the signature assignment reflection, which is a series of questions and my answers thereto.

 The first question I was asked to answer for the reflection is, “What principles of Physics are involved in your signature assignment? List each one and show how it applies to your signature assignment in detail. Inclusion of any mathematics is good.” This was a difficult question to answer because there were so many different principles involved here and I tried to list as many as possible, but I know there are still some that I’m missing that I can’t think of. This is how vast physics can be!

The ones I noticed though are:

• Motion and forces: Essentially everything in the assignment has to do with this.
• Conservation of energy and momentum: Looking at E=mc^2, there’s a good example of this “negative energy”. It’s just being conserved.
• Electricity and magnetism: This has to do with everything. Everything emits some kind of field because it has electrons.
• Heat: The stars emit Heat.
• Waves: Waves are everywhere. They come from the sun, and even from the ocean!
• Gravity: The moon’s gravity affects the earth’s ocean tides.
• Energy
• Intertia: The earth has inertia because it has started spinning and will continue to do so.
• Kinetic energy: The earth is moving, so that energy used to move the earth is kinetic because it’s moving.
• Potential energy: The energy that gravity has on an object depending on displacement. The earth has a potential energy because of its displacement from the sun.
• Rotational energy: The energy the earth has from it’s rotation.
• First law of thermodynamics
• Heat: Stars produce heat.
• Heat transfer: In the earth’s ocean, heat from hot water is transferred to cool water.
• Frequency: The magnetic spectrum/light emitted from the sun has different frequencies for different types of waves.
• Light: The electromagnetic spectrum, it’s everywhere. The sun emits light.
• Reflection: The earth’s atmosphere serves as a protection and reflects certain types of waves.
• Linear motion: The earth moves in linear motion around the sun.
• Rotational motion: The earth moves in rotational motion.
• Center of mass: The earth has a center of mass that affects the atmosphere.
• Force: It’s everywhere. The force of gravity is essential for the life on earth.
• Mass: Everything has a mass.
• Momentum: The earth has a momentum in order to be traveling at a liner velocity.
• Newton's laws of motion
• Speed: The speed is measured distance over time, without a vector. The earth has a rotational speed, which helps the climate.
• Velocity: Speed with a vector, velocity can be negative or positive depending on direction. The earth travels with velocity on a line that indicated positive as it goes around the sun.

As you can see, there are MANY different principles in physics, and I listed only a few. I tried to choose the ones that related the most to the material covered in the signature assignment, but if I had to choose all the principles covered in the course, the list would be much more vast!

 I actually didn’t end up using any pictures in my signature assignment. Instead, I used a chart defining some starts in the galaxy Lyra. It provides the star’s name, distance from Earth in light, when the light from the star now visible in the skies of Earth actually left the star, its size compared to the Sun, and the star’s luminosity compared to the Sun.

In the signature assignment, I used the famous equation E = mc2 . E represents units of energy, m represents units of mass, and c2 is the speed of light squared, or multiplied by itself. A firm understanding of this was absolutely essential, because later questions in the assignments were about how this equation could be manipulated and still hold true.

Overall, my experience actually increased my interest in physics. Before it wasn’t so much that I wasn’t interested, it’s that the math for the subject had always been particularly difficult for me, so I wouldn’t go out of my way too often to learn it. Luckily the math in the signature assignment wasn’t too difficult.

 The most challenging part of the signature assignment was actually doing the assignment itself. For a signature assignment, this is the largest one I’ve ever had to do. Luckily, it’s my last! I worked alone for this assignment, because, honestly, I work better that way.

 My performance on this assignment definitely demonstrated achievement of –or progress toward- SLCC’s college-wide learning outcomes. It shows that I have a good understanding of the material presented in the course.

 I once took general chemistry and that class was a beast, and honestly I wish I had taken this class before that one because it helped me learn more conceptually than just getting formulas and textbook thrown at me. It helped me better understand some of the materials that were covered in my chemistry.

The process for the signature assignment was one that I usually take for my bigger assignments. I first made a list of everything about the project that I didn’t already know and researched all about those subjects. Then I made the outline needed for the project and answered the questions.

 Overall, this signature assignment helped me gain a new perspective on a few things about not only the world, but the universe. There were always some questions about things that I never got around to researching and then I’d forget, but as I did assignment in this class, there were moments where I was like, “Oh, Yeah! I’ve been wanting to know why this happened a certain way.” I really loved that about this class, how things were presented so conceptually about everyday things that you probably didn’t realize before.

 We are prompted to answer the following question: How does this signature assignment illustrate the growth you have had in this class, but there was so much growth that I don’t think I could narrow it to any certain area. The first thing that comes to mind is the equations that we had to describe. I don’t think I would have been able to do that very easily if I didn’t take this course in physics. You learn a lot about atoms and the speed of lights, but also a lot about energy and how it can be manipulated for a certain purpose.

 As you can see, this course, as well as the signature assignment for this course has proved to be very beneficial for me. I have a better grasp about the physics happening around me in everyday-life. I better understand all that chemistry I had to learn a while back. Finally, I feel more confident in what the physics equations mean and how to utilize them, which is going to help me out a lot more in my course of becoming an engineer.