Advice on deciding my topic for the Extended Essay

[ErSin3]

Hello everyone I hope I am writing in the right place, it is my first time posting on this forum. I am a student at an international school doing the IB education system. As like many of the past posts here, I am extremely stressed about my physics Extended Essay (Basically a 4000 word essay based on data, focusing on analysis and understanding of physics). My initial idea was to investigate and categorize many different fluids but due to the lack of materials and apparatus I have recently given that up... Now I have 3 weeks until a first draft is due and I have gone wild over the internet looking for another suitable topic. As of now, I have 2 possible areas that might work but are still too elementary. As a last resort I am begging for help from PhysicsForums.

- Impact craters. I want to change the impact angles, density of impact ground, and velocity of the impacting ball. However I can't find enough physics or maths in this experiment that will give me credit for understanding and analyzing the physics behind my data. Can anyone help me perhaps enhance this experiment to be more complex but still possible? I really like maths and complex physics and would like to use it and explain it in my essay!

-Surface tension. I haven't given this one enough attention, but maybe I could vary the temperature of the liquid and measure the differing surface tension. With this topic I like that there is a whole new area of physics about fluids that I can learn and implement in my essay. But this experiment is also way too simple...
As you can probably tell, the experiments I am exploring are ones that do not require complex apparatus or unique resources as I have no idea where to get them and my school doesn't exactly have a wide arrange of materials :( Thank you for all your help and I really hope I can write this essay without failing...

 

[jedishrfu]

Have you looked into what other students have investigated in the past? Sometimes you can take a topic and run with it in a different way.

The successful essays have found doable essays whereas your topics seem to require expertise beyond your abilities.

One possible topic would be a compound pendulum where you measure the pendulum movement perhaps by video taping it and taking measurements from the screen? and then comparing it to a computer generated solution and then contrast why they might vary.

Another might be the bouncing bomb famous in the Dam Busters movie. Nova did a show on how it was designed.



One of the interesting features of the show was how the engineers built a stick grid and filmed the bomb runs through it so they could get gridded measurements. They also did some experiments on skipping balls on the water and what the best angle is which would perhaps be an excellent project.

Yet another could be a study of the antekythira device and how it predicts planetary motion although I think this might be too intense.



Or maybe Davincis machines and how the physics is applied



Lastly, you could use a leaf blower and a frisbee to measure angle of attack or some other frisbee property.

http://web.wellington.org/miller/How the Frisbee Flies.htm

There's also a more detailed frisbee treatment by Sarah Ann Hummel (her Master's thesis) this just awesome in its analysis of the biomechanics of a frisbee throw but it may be too much to handle.

 

[ErSin3]

Thank you so much for your wonderful advice! I will look carefully into each one. To be honest the 2 topics I have mentioned in my post are actual topics used in the Extended Essay exemplars... I was also worried I would basically be copying an already used idea and have no originality and be plagiarizing. Anyways I will look carefully into all of your suggestions, thank you so much for spending your time for a complete stranger!