One Pendulum Less A few weeks ago we looked at how to balance an inverted pendulum as part of a 3 part series on balancing inverted pendulums. Part 2 is still being worked on, but here’s part 3, an exploration of how shaking an inverted pendulum up and down really fast can make it stable.…
Springs, Except More Fun In any introductory physics or differential equation’s class we are introduced to the simple spring mass system. Because of Hooks law it’s nice, linear, and easy to analyze. But not all springs follow Hooks Law. Some, like the duffing spring we’ll analyze in this post, are nonlinear and chaotic. What’s a…
Everything Orbits About Something In our solar system, Moons orbit around planets, which themselves orbit around the sun. Well, actual they orbit about the system barycenter, the combined center of mass between the two bodies. But can we get an object to orbit around a region without a barycenter? Yes! (Kinda) There are actually a…
