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The Foucault pendulum or Foucault's pendulum is a simple device named after French physicist Léon Foucault, conceived as an experiment to demonstrate the Earth's rotation. If a long and heavy pendulum suspended from the high roof above a circular area is monitored over an extended period of time, its plane of oscillation appears to change ...
"Simple gravity pendulum" model assumes no friction or air resistance. A pendulum is a device made of a weight suspended from a pivot so that it can swing freely. [1] 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 toward the equilibrium position.
In 1673 Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens in his mathematical analysis of pendulums, Horologium Oscillatorium, showed that a real pendulum had the same period as a simple pendulum with a length equal to the distance between the pivot point and a point called the center of oscillation, which is located under the pendulum's center of gravity and ...
The animations below depict the motion of a simple (frictionless) pendulum with increasing amounts of initial displacement of the bob, or equivalently increasing initial velocity. The small graph above each pendulum is the corresponding phase plane diagram; the horizontal axis is displacement and the vertical axis is velocity. With a large ...
Simple pendulum. Since the rod is rigid, the position of the bob is constrained according to the equation f(x, y) = 0, the constraint force C is the tension in the rod. Again the non-constraint force N in this case is gravity. Newton's laws and the concept of forces are the usual starting point for teaching about mechanical systems. [5]
The pendulum, due to its isochronism, could be a much better timekeeper. His son Vincenzio began building a clock, but both he and Galileo died before it was completed. The first pendulum clock was built in 1657 by Christiaan Huygens using a different design. The pendulum clock remained the world's most accurate timekeeper for 300 years, until ...
The most accurate pendulum clocks were controlled electrically. [166] The Shortt–Synchronome clock, an electrical driven pendulum clock designed in 1921, was the first clock to be a more accurate timekeeper than the Earth itself. [167] A succession of innovations and discoveries led to the invention of the modern quartz timer.
Galileo had observed the regularity of a pendulum and Huygens first incorporated it in a clock; [132] in 1668, Hooke demonstrated his new device to keep a pendulum swinging regularly in unsteady conditions. [133] His invention of a tooth-cutting machine enabled a substantial improvement in the accuracy and precision of timepieces. [133]