2004 HS Photo Contest Pictures

2004 High School Photo Contest Winners
Sponsored by Vernier Software and Technology
129th AAPT National Meeting , Sacramento, CA

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Third Place - Contrived Category

Title: Seventh Inning Stretch
Student: Matt Carpenter
School: Noble and Greenough School, Dedham, MA
Teacher: Christine Pasterczyk

This spring I worked on a project investigating how rubber membranes react to the impact of high-speed projectiles. To take this photo, I covered the mouth of a large garbage can with a sheet of latex, which I anchored uniformly around the rim of the can. From a distance, I fired a paintball from a gun onto the middle of the rubber sheet. What you see here is the result.

To accentuate the fact that parts of the latex were stretching while others were not, I drew a grid on the rubber. Where the rubber has stretched, the grid lines look curved. Where it has not stretched, the lines still look straight. This reminds me of pictures demonstrating curved space in Einstein's theory of general relativity.