High School Photo Winner's Showcase

School: Albany High School

Teacher: Valerie Risk

This image shows a plastic baseball bat undergoing general motion, meaning it is undergoing both translational and rotational motion as it travels through the air. The fulcrum of this rotational motion is the center of mass of the bat, which is easily recognizable by the trace of light through the air. Despite the rest of the bat’s evident rotational motion, the center of mass maintains a strong parabolic projectile motion due to the fact that the bat is only acted on by gravity when in the air. This realization underscores a central theme of mechanical physics, which is that the center of mass of any object can be defined as the point that moves in the same path that a particle would move if subjected to the same net force.