Thursday, March 31, 2005
Ever since the ASU physics department installed a pendulum wave set in F-wing, I've had a small part of my brain devoted to figuring out how it worked. The critical piece of information that eluded me was the function that determined the length of each pendulum. I could model the motion of a set of pendulums in a Java applet rather easily, but I couldn't get them to create the patters that the physical pendulum set could. I finally looked up a paper on the phenomenon and found the formula to tune the lengths, and I completed my applet.
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I've updated the applet. There was a problem with changing the numbers so that the lengths of the pendulums would be greater than the height of the applet so you couldn't see them. Also, if the pendulum lengths were too short, the applet would freak out and you would just see a motionless circle. So I programmed in filters that check for consistency and limit the possible values for the numbers. If anyone cares, that is.
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