Our Outdoors: Potential Energy

The rating on a box of shotgun shells reads 1180, 1205 or more than 1300 feet per second, the speed at which the pellets are disbursed in pursuit of a thrown clay or an incoming goose. The bent coil at the base of a tip-up flag is precariously held in place by the notch in the T-bar at the top of the plastic and metal fish trap, ready to go off with the tug of a pike below the ice. In that mome...