In the previous post, pendulums of the same length (and hence the same natural frequency) oscillated each other. Here, the point is that the pendulums are of slightly different lengths. And yet:
To my mind this demo isn’t an example of resonance… and that’s a thought we’ll pick up in the next post in this series. Meanwhile, please do share your favourite pendulum demos in the comments. Or, you know, any pendulum-related anecdotes – there’ll never be a better time for those.
It’s not one of my favourites, partly because I think it needs careful performance to appear as amazing as is usually claimed, but also because the subtlety of explanation required hardly seems worth the effort. This film, for example, doesn’t tell us very much. The explanation bit goes:
“There are little forces as [the connecting string] goes out of line that pull from one to the other, transferring energy from [the first pendulum] … over to that one, and then back again.”
Hmm. All that’s doing is describing what we see and replacing the word ‘swing’ with ‘energy,’ and I’m not a big fan of using ‘energy’ as an arm-wave explanation. Robert Winston’s book, snarkily linked above, explains pendulum movement in terms of gravity and momentum, then adds:
“If two pendulums are attached to the same piece of string, they pass their motion back and forth between each other. One pendulum swings, pulling the string it’s hanging from to and fro. This transfers energy to the second pendulum, which starts swinging itself.”
…which, again, is a reasonable description. Is it an explanation, though? I’m unconvinced.
Neither of these ‘explanations’ has begun to cover why it matters that the pendulums are the same length, let alone pesky details like: the demo still works if the connecting string is perfectly taut, when the driving force is delivered by torsion at the suspension point rather than lateral displacement.
But when you try to write a more satisfying explanation you end up in a bit of a mess. I know I did when I wrote this demo into a children’s TV series back in about 1998. A satisfactory explanation has to include (or at least skirt around) energy exchange, mechanical impedance, and resonant frequency – the sheer amount of physics required is, to my mind, beyond what the demo itself will support.
Better, I think, is this variation:
…which is much more clearly about resonance. The inverted spring pendulums also break the visual connection with the phase demonstration in the previous post in this series, which I think would reduce the risk of confusion were one to attempt linking several of these demos together.
After the previous post I may have got a little carried away, and we’re declaring this Pendulum Week on ScienceDemo.org. Fresh pendulum action every morning.
This beautiful demo wasn’t something I’d seen before this film appeared, though the Harvard demos folks behind it trace its history to the University of Maryland in the early 90s, and from there back to Moscow State University previously. Everything old is new again.
Anyway, it’s a beautiful demonstration of pendulum periodicity and, through that, phase. Note that the previous pendulum demo was about the efficiency of energy conversion, and hence the only real link between these two demos is the pendulum itself. You may spot a theme developing here.
It’s so well-known it was included in the recent BBC Challenger dramatisation of Feynman’s last great adventure, previously mentioned on this blog, only to my mind the dramatisation did it badly. With a longer pendulum drop the energy loss is minimal, and you really want your back and particularly the back of your head to be braced against a wall, as shown in the film above. If you stand in open space you’re at significant risk of swaying a little, and with a long enough pendulum you may have only millimetres of leeway.
It’s also one of those demos for which I’ve been wary of using volunteers. If they muck around at all they risk a bowling ball to the face, but sometimes a volunteer’s trust that you the performer wouldn’t let any harm come to them is stronger than their understanding of the physics. This is one of those situations where the science is considerably more reliable than the test subject.
Besides, I reckon the best way of performing this demo wouldn’t involve a person at all, but rather a priceless vase borrowed from a museum. Sadly, I’ve never seen it done that way.
Potatoes? Yes. Lemons? Absolutely. Not sure I’ve seen a banana pile before, though. Mind you, if you’re going to build a little tower of the things you might as well use acid-soaked paper anyway…
Time was, if you washed up on a desert island and wanted to predict celestial events to avoid being turned into stew, you had to judge things just right so your preferred island happened to lie in the path of a suitable eclipse. Thanks to advances in technology, you can now predict much more frequent and widely-visible, albeit less spectacular, heavenly events. Like visible ISS passes, for example.
I took this photo from the bit of grass opposite my house in northern England, July 2010. It’s a one-minute exposure, and yes, that streak of light has people in it.
