Physics 4B Thermol Dynamics week 1 day 1

So the first day of physics 4B turns pretty good. I noticed the totally different teaching style from prof. Mason that he gives lecture which experiments go along with. This is really nice since we could exactly know how those formulas were figured out; while at the same time, we were actually discovering theories ourselves.

I'm new to his "white board" thing on the first day of school. We were asked to take pictures of our progression. For the lack of knowing how things work, I wrote down random things that I'm having hard time recalling while posting this blog.

Anyways, we started with some estimation about the room temperature. Of course every group gives different values base on how everyone feels about the temperature. Some gives two decimals, some gives no decimals. Then we find the average value from all the groups. We found the difference between the average temperature and each value, which gives us the precision of our answers.

Then we start the real thermoldynamics stuff.

We were given the mass of alluminum and different temperature.

We were able to calculate the heat q which follows q=mc*\delta T

You probably want to turn yourself around to view this picture. Sorry for that, the first time using this blog, will need some time to figure out things :)
This question was about the heat transfer from a hot object to a cold object. The total heat was constant. Therefore the total heat transfered from each object will add up to zero; since hot object loses heat while the cold object gains heat.
When mass and specific heat capacity were given, it was easy to calculate the change in temperature. then we would find out the initial temperature or the final temperature.

Then as a whole group of class size, we did an experiment of mixing two cups of water. One was hot, the other one was at room temperature.

After we got this result, we realized that the exothermic process is relatively more dramatic than he endothermic process. Because the upper graph which represents the temperature of hot water drops down very fast while the bottom graph which represents the temperature of cold water rise in a slow rate.

Then we did some calculations around heat transfer within the system that contains aluminum and copper.

then we figured out that since the temperature between aluminum and copper were the same, then we can calculate the temeperature in the middle from both side and get the same result.

We did another experiment to find out the relationship between heat and temperature.

And we did it. The graph's slope is the rate of change of heat with respect to temperature.

q=mc*delta T, since m and c are constant, dq/dT=mc  after knowing the slope of the graph, we can calculate what c is.

So this day was not that bad. We did some experiment to figure out the formulas ourselves.