What Happens If You Swing Too Hard?Simply put, the bigger the swing, the more complicated the equations have to be to deal with it. If you're swinging too hard, the rate that the pendulum swings starts to depend on how hard it swings as well as the length. When that happens, the computer will conclude the pendulum is a lot longer than it really is. Try it and see! The swing rate - the "frequency" - doesn't depend on how hard you swing - the "amplitude" - as long as you don't swing it too hard. For little swings, when the mouse swings out twice as far, gravity pushes back twice as hard. The mouse acts like a "simple harmonic oscillator," the only thing physicists really understand. But if you swing too hard, all that stuff isn't accurate anymore. Swing out twice as far, and gravity pushes back less than twice as hard. That makes things complicated. Equations get hard to solve, and swings take longer to complete. So the computer thinks the mouse cord must be longer than it really is. |
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