Physics Of Roller Coasters Essay

When it came to choosing a topic for this assignment we obviously needed to pick something that was centered on physics. At first we were looking doing something towards space or the speed of light, but then Karina brought up the topic of roller coasters and it stuck. It really sounded like a fun topic to cover. In this essay we will be exploring the world of roller coasters. Some of the topics we will cover will be the history, the principles that allow the cars to continue throughout the length of the track, and the physics of roller coasters. The history of rollercoasters is a very interesting and long one. According to (How Stuff Works), some of the first known roller coasters where in Russia that became popular during the 16th and 17th centuries. People would apparently use sleds made out of wood or blocks of ice and would fly down ice slides. The only way that they figured out how to stop the sleds was to plow into piles of sand at the bottom of the slides. Some of these slides were up to 80 feet tall. Others saw this and brought it over to France. They experimented and waxed the sleds instead of ice. Eventually they started to add wheels to the bottoms of
It was a very cool experience to find out the history of roller coasters. Going from a wooden sled or block of ice sliding down a hillside, to building them out of wood, and finally out of steel, was very similar to other creations. People realizing that there are better and more efficient ways to create roller coasters made them what they are today. The one principle that we talked about is centripetal force which occurs on the loops on a roller coaster, the inward forces applied on the rider during the loops. In the main part of this essay we learned the physics of roller coasters and how they are applied to the