16 Jan
2018
16 Jan
'18
11:44 p.m.
On Tue, Jan 16, 2018 at 3:07 PM, Cris Moore <moore@santafe.edu> wrote:
. the period of a pendulum scales as \sqrt(L/g) where L is its length and g the acceleration of gravity — and the mass at the end doesn’t (can’t) matter.
In high school physics, our teacher had us time the periods of pendula of various lengths (measured in meters) and masses (measured in kilograms). Numerically, we got 2 sqrt(L) seconds, where the units, of course, make no sense. Inserting g to get the units right, we got 2 k sqrt(L/g), where k was the unitless square root of 9.8---which we then realized was pi to roughly one part in 300. -- Mike Stay - metaweta@gmail.com http://www.math.ucr.edu/~mike http://reperiendi.wordpress.com