Love (As Told By My Physics Equations) | Teen Ink

Love (As Told By My Physics Equations)

February 24, 2011
By MorganC GOLD, Hereford, Maryland
MorganC GOLD, Hereford, Maryland
10 articles 0 photos 0 comments

The sum of forces equals mass times the acceleration. You’re the acceleration, always pushing forward, always pushing backward.

The initial potential energy of a system equals the final kinetic energy of a system. Potential energy is mass, initial height and the acceleration of gravity. Kinetic energy is mass and velocity times velocity, halved. I’m the mass that always seems to cancel out when the physicist equates the two.

Work is the integral of force and the derivative of the distance. When the calculus cloud clears, work equals force times distance. You’re the distance I travel but it’s so infinite, the work becomes infinite. I won’t give up though because you still accelerate the force that pushes me towards you.

Power is the derivative of work over time. Integration’s the key now. But my work is infinite and my time is very little. Where will my power come from when your force keeps driving and my energy dwindles?

Torque is the radius crossed with the force. My cross product rules don’t work when your force intertwines. No radius is big enough or small enough to counter it.

The moment of inertia is the sum of all the masses times their radiuses squared. Sometimes, you have to use the center of the masses, like a long thin rod. Usually, that’s where I feel like I stand in your presence, shaky and unbalanced. My moment of inertia here, one twelfth of the mass times the radius squared, is never stable.

The potential energy of a spring is half of the spring constant times the distance the spring is compressed squared. This equation would be great but the distance is great and the constant isn’t constant at all but oscillating, your constant is always oscillating, making this equation useless.

The force using Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation is the gravitation constant, the first mass, and the second mass all over the radius squared. Using Newton’s second law, we can make the whole thing equal to mass times acceleration but then acceleration would have to be rotational acceleration, velocity squared over the radius. You cross out one radius, putting me that much closer but the gravity keeps pulling me down, down, down and you still seem out of my reach, even if I model you as a point mass.

When I try to deal with your oscillations, I try an equation for the period of a spring: two times pi over omega (the square root of the spring constant over the mass) or the inverse of the frequency. But the spring constant isn’t constant because you’re never constant and if I used the period of a pendulum, my omega becomes the square root of the length of the pendulum over gravity and the gravity still pulls me down, down, down.

Capacitance is the charge over the electric potential. If I modeled you as a point charge, maybe this would work but I would still need to find your electric potential and I would need an epsilon for that but that’s a constant. No constant remains here.

I wanted to find your current but that derivative of your charge over time just doesn’t integrate neat enough; it’s not pretty or elegant, just messy.

You don’t make sense to the macroscopic world. Maybe you belong in the quantum one. Does your energy equal your mass times the speed of light squared? You move fast enough, for sure but can I truly model you as a point mass?

Perhaps you’re the Schwarzschild Metric, fraught with the partial derivatives and eleven dimensions that I need matrices to show but that I can never really model on two-dimensional paper, just in my mind.

Are you my antiparticle, the positron to my electron? Or just a simple neutrino, massless and perfectly neutral, in harmony with the universe? Maybe you’re the Higgs Boson and I really won’t be able to figure you out, like the beginning of the universe, whatever way the pencil fell.

Are you the missing force carrier particle to the force of gravity? You pull me down mysteriously yet still pull and I can’t figure out why. No graviton here.

My physics arsenal is depleted. How do you do it? You manage to defy physics and you don’t even know it. I can model you as all the variables I can think of but you never truly fit, do you? Maybe that’s the point of it. No hard or set rules.

Well, then I have a lot to learn.

The author's comments:
My AP Physics C formula sheet . . .

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