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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.
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.
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]
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.
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,
Monumental conical pendulum clock by Farcot, 1878. A conical pendulum consists of a weight (or bob) fixed on the end of a string or rod suspended from a pivot.Its construction is similar to an ordinary pendulum; however, instead of swinging back and forth along a circular arc, the bob of a conical pendulum moves at a constant speed in a circle or ellipse with the string (or rod) tracing out a ...
These curves correspond to the pendulum swinging periodically from side to side. If < then the curve is open, and this corresponds to the pendulum forever swinging through complete circles. In this system the separatrix is the curve that corresponds to =. It separates — hence the name — the phase space into two distinct areas, each with a ...
Moment of inertia, denoted by I, measures the extent to which an object resists rotational acceleration about a particular axis; it is the rotational analogue to mass (which determines an object's resistance to linear acceleration). The moments of inertia of a mass have units of dimension ML 2 ([mass] × [length] 2).