Georgia Tech Inspired Scientific Experiments

This was my late friend Sam Carsley (1941-2013). This picture of him with Allatoona Dam as a back drop reminds me of the time he was going to Georgia and I helped him partake in some scientific experiments. Lide for instance the time he came by with a stack of holess paper. We took the paper to the top of Allatoona Dam. On the east side of the dam the water appeared to be fairly deep. On the west died the Etowah River, looking down at it, looked shallow. It went on to Cartersville and Rome. His fellow students and their professor discussed the wind coming up the Etowah Valley from the west naturally hit the damn and went upward, causing a strong upwind. So we folded the paper sheets into paper airplanes and threw them off the west side. They would fall only about the level of the top of the damn, then the up-shaft wind caught them and shot them p again. Then, the same thing happened. And we kept making more airplanes and more the atmosphere became more and more cluttered with paper airplanes. Some going up, some making a nose dive down for a short distance. I don’t think polluting the Etowah rRver with wet paper was anybody’s concern back then. Another scientific experiment was west of Marietta near Dallas Georgia, where they had the DALLAS DRAGSTRIP on Weekends. My friends and I went there to see he races sometimes on Sunday. We discovered there is a road closed to the public that ran up near the Paulding County Drive-In Theater, which was an idea place to park to clip into the drag races. At Tech Sam was studying Einstein’s Theory of Relativity Sam said to put it simple, imagine standing in the back of a bus. If it suddenly stopped, standing in the aisle without holding onto anything, you would not stop. Your body weight would fling itself up the aisle. It would be in the motion as the bus was. Sam had just bought a green and white 56 Chevvy convertible. He believed the same theory would apply if you slammed on the brakes and threw a rock straight up in he air. If the car stopped still, the rock should land in front of the car. So, we did not have a rock but we were drinking beer. By the time on the lonely private little road we each had an empty beer can. Sam said he would holler “NOW!” when he stomped down on his brakes and I was to throw my empty beer can straight up in the air. “now!” Sam said. “WHOMP!”, was the sound the can made when it hit the hood, making an ugly scar on the Chevvy's hood.