The Simple Pendulum with Uniformly Changing String Length

How does the Period of a Pendulum Change when the Length of String is varied?

Periodic motion involving a swinging pendulum was studied. As the pendulum oscillated, its motion was captured using video and computer technology. When analyzed, the period of the motion was found to be given by two multiplied by Pi multiplied by the square root of the quantity of the pendulum’s length divided by the acceleration due to gravity. Therefore, the period, or time to complete a ful...

The (Not So) Simple Pendulum

Pendulums are the defining feature of pendulum clocks, of course, but today they don’t elicit much thought. Most modern “pendulum” clocks simply drive the pendulum to provide a historical look, but a great deal of ingenuity originally went into their design in order to produce highly accurate clocks. This essay explores horologic design efforts that were so important at one time—not gearwork, w...

Simple Pendulum Revisited

We describe a 8085 microprocessor interface developed to make reliable time period measurements. The time period of each oscillation of a simple pendulum was measured using this interface. The variation of the time period with increasing oscillation was studied for the simple harmonic motion (SHM) and for large angle initial displacements (non-SHM). The results underlines the importance of the ...

Dynamics of the pendulum with periodically varying length

Simple pendulum determination of the gravitational constant.

We determined the Newtonian constant of gravitation G by interferometrically measuring the change in spacing between two free-hanging pendulum masses caused by the gravitational field from large tungsten source masses. We find a value for G of (6.672 34±0.000 14)×10(-11)  m3  kg(-1)  s(-2). This value is in good agreement with the 1986 Committee on Data for Science and Technology (CODATA) value...