Physics Project Test

Physics 211 Web Project
Physics Through Video Games.

For as long as people have had computers, there have been computer games. In 1972 computer games had one of their first successful commercial games published, Pong(Pong-Story). Pong is a classic and everyone loves it, the game is simple, try to best understand the trajectory of the ball as it bounces off the wall and send the ball back flying at your opponent. Pong is a great game and a perfect way to think about physics and try to teach yourself how to better understand the physics of whats going on around you. Just like how we are taught to think of every object as a point particle or a system and examine all the ways the forces are acting on the ball and create free body diagrams, the game Pong has set up its on free body diagram that you can play with and test. This is a great way for people to experience the law of momentum because we can see that the ball is following some representation of physics in the real world.

Google Images	Google Images	Pong Story
In the above picture Pong has been recreated and emulated on newer computers that have a lot more power to them than the original machine itself. This picture is a good example of a free body diagram though. In fact if we gave the ball a Mass(m), and velocity(m/s), and find an accurate displacement of the walls(x) we could find a force that the imaginary ball has through F=MA and the conservation of momentum (University Physics). But to do this the game will have to be able to mimic and act just like physics in the real world, to do this people have invented physics engines for more powerful games that do represent real physics.	By watching the the trail of the ball we can see that the ball does act the way we think it would. Just by looking at the angle we could determine that at least on a small level conservation of momentum is conserved for a perfectly elastic collision with the wall. By that we can see the ball has a greater force acting on it after the collision with the goalie wall because it shoots off at a smaller angle, therefore the ball should be moving faster now and the other player has less time to react (University Physics).	The game of Pong is really about understanding physics and how to use the force you can use as the goalie wall to speed up the ball and beat your opponent. Pong was very successful when it first came out and many people enjoyed this game. But I do not think many of them thought about how the game is just a breakdown of a simple physics idea, conservation of momentum. Creating a fun way to think about physics has made many people very rich and famous. In the above picture is a set of old Atari games such as pong that have now become collectors items worth a lot of money (Pong-Story).

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