Huygens' Clock Puzzle Solved

Posted by Hemos on Wednesday February 20, 2002 @08:30PM from the tick-tock-tick-tick-tock dept.

PhotoGuy writes "Okay, I haven't heard of this puzzle either until now, but it sounds like a fascinating phenomenon. According to this article:Huygens had two clocks side by side and he found that even when they began out of sync, they soon got into a rhythm where the pendulum on one moved as if it were a mirror image of the other.The article is pretty light on the explanation, noting only the conditions required (small relative mass of the pendulums [pendula?], relatively close speed of the clocks), and not really addressing the physics behind it. " There's a great site at Georgia Tech that explains the puzzle in more detail.

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Re:Mainly luck? by ishark · 2002-02-20 22:32 · Score: 1, Flamebait

It's a very difficult problem to model. It involves two pendulums (both of which, despite what many of your freshmen physics professors told you, are nonlinear oscillators), and a coupling mass.

I'm not familiar with this particular system, but are you sure you need to consider nonlinearities to obtain the synchronization? Isn't some k(x1-x2) enough to deal with it?
I don't have the time now to hack together a perl script to simulate the system, I'll try later...