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Huygens' Clock Puzzle Solved
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.
Like the rest of the human race.
Get a job and pay your poetry studies yourself. Leave the hardworking taxpayers alone.
That'll teach you to support a regime that supports the censoring of valid opinions, and censorship of anyone who moderates said opinion up.
The Slashdot Janitors have been consumed by their own hubris, and honestly believe they are the leaders of their "Open Source" utopia.
The same utopia that needs advertising sponsorship from Microsoft.
And you're so full of yourself that you can't hear how stupid you sound.
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...