Building and Testing a a Rube Goldberg Machine

As we worked on our Rube Goldberg Machine, we uncovered the physics that was taking place. Many aspects of physics come into play when building and testing a Rube Goldberg Machine. Some examples are Newton’s three laws, collisions, conservation of momentum, efficiencies, forces, energy, work, simple machines, and projectiles.

We ran into Newtons First Law, which claims that an object resists change in motion, as the marble rolled down the floor it didn’t stop until it was acted against by friction. As we moved on, Newtons Second Law came into play when we were creating our lever as we need a ball that would roll down with enough acceleration that it could knock down the objects. Newton’s second law claims, that F=MA. So, we choose a golf ball since it would have more mass than a rubber ball, but it would have less acceleration when the lever was started. This way, it would knock the upcoming objects. Newtons Third Law claims that every action yields an equal and opposite reaction. This is proven in our Rube Goldberg Machine when the small car was rolling down the tracks as the wheels pushes against the track making the track move backwards. The track provides an equal and opposite direction by pushing the wheels forward.

Different collisions took place throughout the process of the Rube Goldberg Machine. This included Elastic and Inelastic collisions. An example of an Elastic Collision in our Rube Goldberg Machine is when the car went down the track and collided with another car. Elastic collisions are defined as collisions with conservation or no loss of momentum. This is proven by the first car which transferred its momentum to the second car thus momentum was perfectly conserved. An Inelastic Collision is seen in our project ...

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...hese complex machines make work easier for us. Simple machines are also useful. For one they make up all complex machines. They also make work more manageable.

The definition of a projectile is an object that the only force acting on it is gravity. Projectile motion is the path the projectile takes. We saw and used this topic a few times in our project. The first time we saw it was when the marble was flew out of the pipe and was in the air. The second time we used the topic to make sure the trains fell on the lever in the correct spot so the golf ball would roll. The third time it was used, was when the board fall on the balloon. It fell as half of a parabola since it started standing up.

Our machine showed physics in many ways. It used Newtons laws, collisions, and more aspects of physics. Our project showed ten different aspects in detail. This is our machine.