Have you ever taken a coin and decided to spin it? This photo is of a spinning one-dollar coin on a black table. This is an excellent example of rotational motion, the spinning motion of an object about an axis. The coin is given its rotational kinetic energy when a person does work on it by applying a torque on its edges. Several outlines of a circle are visible. The outline size increases in length when farther away from the center or axis of rotation. To achieve this light streak effect, I held my lamp closer and turned off surrounding lights so that the reflected light from the ridges of the coin would trace out their paths. When something spins, the molecules closer to the axis of rotation travel in a smaller circle than the molecules at the outer edges. This is why the outermost molecules move at a faster speed: they are traveling a greater circumference than the inner molecules in the same amount of time. Notice how the coin is more blurry on the edges than in the center. This is due to the very fact that the outer edges are moving faster. Eventually, the coin stopped, but it did so in an interesting way. I expected the coin to slow down as it stopped, but it sped up as it fell toward the table. As it lost its gravitational potential energy, the energy transformed into more rotational kinetic energy, so the spinning increased in frequency.