physics and football!?

Do you know how much football relies on physical intuition? Our players must be applied physics experts! Last weekend PAGSA partnered with the Society of Physics Students (SPS), our undergraduate counterpart, to come up with some fun physics demonstrations to show off at our booth. With the help of the campus machine shop, we made a see-saw with an adjustable fulcrum and invited children to guess where to put the fulcrum so their weight could lift a "dinosaur" (well....physics student in a dino costume). We also had a Van de Graaff generator, and a magnet that launched small metal tubes into the air, or heated them rapidly, depending on the nature of the metal. Very cool!

Pictured above: some of our scary physics dinosaurs.