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A pendulum is a body suspended from a fixed support such that it freely swings back and forth under the influence of gravity. When a pendulum is displaced sideways from its resting, equilibrium position, it is subject to a restoring force due to gravity that will accelerate it back towards the equilibrium position.
For example, an experimental uncertainty analysis of an undergraduate physics lab experiment in which a pendulum can estimate the value of the local gravitational acceleration constant g. The relevant equation [ 1 ] for an idealized simple pendulum is, approximately,
The presence of the acceleration of gravity g in the periodicity equation (1) for a pendulum means that the local gravitational acceleration of the Earth can be calculated from the period of a pendulum. A pendulum can therefore be used as a gravimeter to measure the local gravity, which varies by over 0.5% across the surface of the Earth. [107]
This procedure does increase the number of equations to solve compared to Newton's laws, from 3N to 3N + C, because there are 3N coupled second-order differential equations in the position coordinates and multipliers, plus C constraint equations. However, when solved alongside the position coordinates of the particles, the multipliers can yield ...
Classical mechanics utilises many equations—as well as other mathematical concepts—which relate various physical quantities to one another. These include differential equations, manifolds, Lie groups, and ergodic theory. [4] This article gives a summary of the most important of these.
In physics and mathematics, in the area of dynamical systems, an elastic pendulum [1] [2] (also called spring pendulum [3] [4] or swinging spring) is a physical system where a piece of mass is connected to a spring so that the resulting motion contains elements of both a simple pendulum and a one-dimensional spring-mass system. [2]
The following is not the method Cavendish used, but describes how modern physicists would calculate the results from his experiment. [ 26 ] [ 27 ] [ 28 ] From Hooke's law , the torque on the torsion wire is proportional to the deflection angle θ {\displaystyle \theta } of the balance.
Newton's law of motion for a particle of mass m written in vector form is: = , where F is the vector sum of the physical forces applied to the particle and a is the absolute acceleration (that is, acceleration in an inertial frame) of the particle, given by: = , where r is the position vector of the particle (not to be confused with radius, as ...