Students find learning laws of physics a pretty wild ride

At Busch Gardens, it is. Thrill rides and a professor's wacky stunts teach students it also can be a lot of fun.

By MELIA BOWIE, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published December 7, 2002

TAMPA -- For a split second, just as the roller coaster carrying them careened down the tracks, the screaming teenagers thought wistfully of their safe seats in physics class.

Just for a second, that is.

Then they remembered where they were. Busch Gardens. On a school day. Studying the laws of physics via adventure rides, bumper cars and lectures that felt more like rock concerts.

Centripetal acceleration, free fall, kinetic energy.

"We learned about it before we came," said Sickles High School junior Tim Nowak.

In fact, they were tested on it the day before, added classmate Shea Hensel, a senior.

"This is like examples," he said. At 40 to 60 mph.

More than 2,600 middle and high school students from around the state poured into the park early Friday. They came carrying protractors and calculators, stopwatches and workbooks for Busch Gardens' annual Physics Day -- a larger-than-life science lab led by Virginia professor David Wright.

"They ride the rides and talk to each other, do their workbooks and compare notes," said Wright, who teaches astronomy and physics at Tidewater Community College in Virginia.

He has done so since 1974 and has more faith in physics than some might deem safe.

Wright's audience came from Carrollwood Day School, St. John's Episcopal Parish, King, Durant and Bloomingdale high schools in Hillsborough County. Others came from Largo Middle, St. Petersburg High and Clearwater Central Catholic High in Pinellas.

With strobe lights and booming music, props and sound effects, Wright enthralled the standing room only crowd as he jumped off ladders, fired tomatoes with a slingshot, and performed his piece de resistance:

"Me lying on a bed of (840) nails with someone smashing a cinder block on my chest with a sledgehammer."

Umm, the point of that particular experiment?

Newton's Law of Inertia, he said. And the principle of pressure.

"It doesn't hurt at all," Wright insisted.

There is more than one nail to support each pound of his weight so there is no pressure on his back. And the cinder block, which is placed atop a board on his chest, is such a massive, inert object that it resists change -- including the hammer's force.

So would the teens try it?

They screamed and gasped. "This guy is crazy!" decided 16-year-old James Solomon from Armwood High School.

But the teens never looked away.

Afterward a group from Tampa Bay Tech glanced at the stage and debated if they would be willing to lie on the bed of nails.

"It could hurt . . . but I would do it," said Alan Eaton, 16. He just tested G-forces (gravitational forces) and weightlessness on the park's Python roller coaster.

"We didn't really pay attention . . . it looked like it was working," he sheepishly added.

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