Ok, I can honestly say, when I signed up for physics class, I never imagined that part of the class would be cartoons. Like, really? I am going to go to class to...watch cartoons??? But there is more to it than that. We must laugh at the comedy show that is cartoon physics. Unless of course a coyote can push a boulder which appears to be more than twice the size of himself down a ledge, across a road, back of a cliff on the other side which is taller than the ledge, and when all is said and done, have a boulder on top of himself.
Once again, laugh away at the cartoon physics because that shouldn't be physically possible. But it does make an interesting conversation, and lead to a lab involving attempting to figure out just how high you would need to release a ball from to get it to go in a loop, where you then use mgh=PE to figure out the potential energy needed to create such a phenomena.
But lets look for a moment at the energy. The boulder starts with all potential energy, and ends with all potential energy once it lands on top of the coyote. But at the base of the canyon it would be all kinetic energy, since there is no way it can gain any more energy (and yet it magically does) and as the boulder goes up the cliff and is in the air, it has both.
Back to our experiment. Based on what the cartoon showed, you should be able to release a ball at half the height of something and have it go in a loop. That is illogical though, because the object needs to have enough energy to go up the other side. So we did a mini version of this to see what the minimum height to get a ball to go in a loop would be. We got our ball to go around at a height of 14in. or ..228m in extra height, with the ball weighing 9.2g. mgh=PE made PE=20.5564
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