A new roller coaster is advertised as having a perfectly efficient (energy is conserved) first drop without the presence of an additional applied force. Upon riding this roller coaster, a group of students questions whether the roller coaster is actually perfectly efficient and want to design an experiment to test this question. The students hypothesized that inclined surfaces approach perfect efficiency as the surface increases in steepness.

(a) Design an experiment to test the hypothesis stated by the students above. The student has equipment that is typically found in a high school science laboratory. Identify the variable that will be measured and describe how it will be measured.

(b) Design an experiment to test the hypothesis stated by the students above. The student has equipment that is typically found in a high school science laboratory. Identify at least two variables that will need to be held constant in order to have valid and replicable results.

(c) Describe the procedure to be used to test the hypothesis in narrative form. Give enough detail so that another student could replicate the experiment. The procedure should include an explanation of how efficiency will be determined/calculated.

A student runs the experiment as described in parts a-c. The student concludes that error occurred when running the experiment because the data shows the steepest incline tested was more than 100% efficient, violating a fundamental law in physics. Write a paragraph that identifies the physics law that appears to have been violated and defines the law, explain what the student's results would mean and how they are a violation of the identified principle, and describe an error that could have occurred during the experiment to lead to these results.