I walked into class one day and noticed there were eight pendulums hanging from various points in the room, each of them longer than the other. Then, we were handed the Pit and Pendulum worksheet to write down all of the different times the pendulums took per swing. At first, my group mate and I only swung the pendulums once, but soon learned that more accurate results were gathered by swinging the pendulum around five times, then dividing the time we got from that into fifths. |
The results were not very surprising based on my prior knowledge of pendulums. The longer one's had a longer swinging time than the shorter ones. The longer it got, the longer one swing cycle would take.
One thing that that threw me off was how the two foot pendulum got a longer swing time than the three foot pendulum. This could be because of multiple things. One could be that we timed it incorrectly, or that we did less trials, or the swing got interrupted on either one of the pendulum's trials. |