Swingcal Physics of Swing Lecture

Since I've already posted my SwingCal etiquette lecture, I figured I'd post my other most talked about SwingCal lecture (the others I've given were boring, so I'll spare you).

A little background, Will and I are both physicists, and so we both prefer to think in terms of physics. Our students will agree that we make a ton of physics analogies when we are teaching, as the Berkeley scene has a disproportionate amount of technical thinkers. I do want to say that, as any physics analogy, none of these models are perfect. Like a spherical cow or Indiana Jones moving at .8c, we don't mean all of these to be taken literally. I know that there has been a lot of talk of the role of the follower in the real swing blogosphere, so I'm not going to go into that. Most of the students in SwingCal had only been dancing a couple to a few months, so simplicity=good.

Yeahhh google docs template!

This first slide is about the usual depth of physics we go into when teaching a beginning lesson...

Here we get a little more complicated. Impulse people, impulse. Thinking ahead and being decisive is good. Say no to whiplash.

This slide was more analogy than anything, but you can't talk Newton's First and Second without mention of the third.

I know a lot of people use the potential/kinetic analogy a lot when talking about the swing out. Totally true.

I believe we also mentioned that when you artificially add energy (such as on 8) it feels uncomfortable and is more difficult to maintain because you are doing additional work on the system! Same if you are the kind of lead who stays in one place for the whole swingout. Think of all the work your follow is doing!

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Yes, we totally did. Also worth a mention that trying to put together a similar graph using Matlab proved extremely difficult to look nice.

Quote of the day for this would be "For those of you who are mathematically minded, sorry but this curve is not differentiable at the ends" -Gina

This is a reference to this video here starting at around 1:45 or so.

The animated GIF in the above slide can be found here

Look, a swingout is just like a binary star system! I think it's funny and also relevant sometimes people have more "dancing mass" (heaviness) than others, which forces the partner to move around them more.

Will had a really cool physics demo on his computer showing spring systems of different masses, but his computer wasn't working for this presentation.

We had a hard time thinking of how to end the presentation, so we decided to keep it short and to the point.

And finally, when we took questions..

Student: What happens when you are doing a swingout at relativistic speeds?

Gina: The beats get slower.