Pendulum hypothesis?

Question

everyone's done an experiment with a pendulum. can you help me with a pendulum hypothesis that can be done with limited space and requires little equipment? For example of materials, 20cm pendulum made of fishing line and sinker. Thanks

Answer 1

You could vary the string length to see how this affects the period of the pendulum (time taken for the sinker to get back to the position it started at)

You would obviously need some kind of stopwatch and a ruler to measure the varying length of string. Though hopefully you have more than 20cm, I'd recommend a metre to get good results! (you can easily vary the string length by tieing it further along the string at the top each time, no need to cut it)

To do this experiment you will obviously have to keep other variables constant, so you'd have to keep the height you drop the pendulum weight from the same.  Also the angle at which you drop it from - ie. always keep it parallel to work surface. (although for longer lengths do expect some shift in the angle after it has been going for a while)

Incase you didn't already know, the formula relating period and string length is:

T=2pi *sqrt* L/g

where T is period, L is string length and g is force of gravity (9.8 ms^-2)

So that's the experiement. As for the hypothesis, you could propose that the larger L, string length, the larger T, period.  But then again you could propose it gets smaller... :P

Answer 2

I think you might find this link very informational and useful!

http://www.fourmilab.ch/rpkp/experiments...