Current Wars
This type of current, backed by Thomas Edison, flows in only one direction and struggles to travel long distances without losing power.
Direct current
Named after the guy who gave Tesla his first job, this law states that Voltage equals Current times Resistance (V = IR).
(George) Ohm
According to Newton's First Law, an object at rest tends to stay at rest due to this inherent property of matter.
Inertia
Tesla claimed he could build a "Peace Ray" to shoot down enemy aircraft, but the media enthusiastically called it this sci-fi weapon instead.
Death ray
If you roll a bowling ball down the lane, it eventually slows down and stops. Aristotle thought objects just naturally love to rest, but this everyday hidden force is actually stealing the ball's kinetic energy.
Before becoming bitter rivals, Tesla worked for Edison's company. He quit after Edison allegedly refused to pay him a promised $50,000 bonus to redesign DC generators, jokingly telling Tesla, "You don't understand our American" what?
humor or joke
Electrical power is calculated by multiplying voltage by current (P = VI). This is the metric unit used to measure power.
Watt
This law of thermodynamics states that energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed from one form to another.
Law of conservation of energy
In the movie Back to the Future, Doc Brown needs exactly 1.21 x10^9 Watts of electrical power to send the DeLorean time machine back to 1985. What unit prefix is this?
When a figure skater is spinning in a circle and wants to spin much faster, they will pull their arms tightly into their chest. This works because they are reducing their rotational inertia to conserve this specific quantity.
angular momentum
To prove AC was dangerous, an engineer named Harold Brown (secretly funded by Edison) used AC to invent this grim device, first used in 1890.
Electric Chair
If you have a string of holiday lights and one bulb burns out, causing the entire string to go dark, the lights are wired in this type of circuit.
Series
If Student A and Student B both lift a heavy 50-pound box up a flight of stairs, but Student A does it twice as fast, they both did the same amount of Work, but Student A exerted twice as much of this.
Power
In sci-fi movies like Interstellar or Star Trek, spaceships use these theoretical "tunnels" through spacetime to instantly travel across galaxies, bypassing the cosmic speed limit of light.
Wormhole
f a car moving at 60 mph crashes head-on into an identical car also moving at 60 mph, the total momentum of the two-car system immediately after the crash (assuming they stick together) will be exactly this.
Zero
This eccentric billionaire named his electric car company after Nikola Tesla, but arguably runs his business much more like Thomas Edison.
Elon Musk
To transmit power across hundreds of miles, power companies must do this to the voltage prior to bringing it into a house.
Step down
A 2 kg physics textbook is sitting on a shelf and has exactly 100 Joules of Gravitational Potential Energy. If it falls off the shelf, right before it hits the ground, its Kinetic Energy will be exactly this many Joules.
100 J
Isaac Newton was a genius, but he was also incredibly eccentric. He famously stuck a large sewing needle into his own eye socket just to see how altering the shape of his eyeball would affect this optical phenomenon.
Color perception
A large 4,000 kg truck traveling at 25 m/s hits a tiny 2,000 kg compact car traveling at 20 m/s in a head-on collision. Does the truck or the car "win"
Car
Supposedly, Tesla had a lifelong obsession and deep romantic affection for a specific type of city bird he fed at his hotel window.
Pidgeon
A Calorie has 1000 calories. A calorie has 4.18 J of energy. An Apple Juice box of 90 Calories contains this many Joules.
376,200 J
You bring a negatively charged rod close to a neutral metal sphere. While the rod is still there, you touch the sphere with your finger, which acts as a "ground". The sphere is now left with this type of permanent net charge.
positive
In 1997, physicists won a satirical "Ig Nobel Prize" for successfully using an incredibly strong magnetic field to levitate this small, living amphibian in mid-air.
A frog
A satellite is in a perfectly circular orbit around Earth. Even though the satellite's speed remains exactly constant at 7,000 m/s, physicists say it is still constantly accelerating. Why?
It changing direction