When we arrived at the physics lab we were all ready for an exciting day of knowledge and fun. At the beginning of the day, the professor started discussing Newton's Three Laws of Motion. For example, to model inertia, a trolley was set up with a ball which was ejected, and then landed in a moving trolley a couple seconds later. This was a great way to give us an actual demonstration of the ideas and concepts that we had learnt in physics class at Masada or Moriah.
After the demonstrations, our professor followed the crime mystery theme from the previous day, we were tasked with solving a murder! The situation was that a person was shot outside of his property, three suspects who were in his house were his brother, his wife, and his business partner, each on different floors. Each suspect had a different gun each with its own respective speed. Using a bit of maths and a ball canon, we calculated who shot him and with which gun.
After lunch, we had the light and laser section of the day, where we walked to the back room with very weird ergonomic kneeling chairs. Firstly, the professor shot a laser at the wall and then used a smoke machine to make the whole length of the laser visible. Then he enlightened us on the dangers of lasers, including permanent blindness and burns, so we weren't eager to go any closer to it. Then, just to make the laser look even, cooler he shot it through a semi-cylinder of water which was placed in front of it, so it was refracted onto the other side of the wall. This was just a brief example of refraction which we observed in great deal later that day.
Just to give us an understanding of how powerful our small iPhone cameras are, our professor brought out a very basic antique camera. This was just a cardboard box with a very small hole on one side and photographic film on the other side. When an object or face is illuminated in front of the hole, a faint rendition of the object appears upside down on the film. This was a real eye-opening experience about an object we use everyday but know nothing about.
Then we were able to do some hands-on work with rays of light. In the first experiment, we were given a light, and a magnifying glass where we had to project the light onto a plastic sheet and work out the answer to an equation. In the second experiment, we refracted light into a semi-circle of glass and observed at which angle it exited at. All this practical work gave us a new view on physics and a greater understanding of light.
After a hard day at uni, we went out for a fun filled evening on Ben Yehuda, full of shops, food and even an open piano for people to play on. After this educational day, we were all ready to learn more interesting things over the remaining days on IST!