Investigation the simple pendulum
Plan
For my experiment, I am going to investigate the simple pendulum. The simple pendulum is a piece of string attached at one place from where it will pivot; at the bottom of the piece of string is some kind of bob.
There are certain variables that have to be taken into account: Air resistance, time for one swing (period), the weight of the bob, the angle of swing and the length of the string.
I don’t feel that I really need to take into account the air resistance, as the string is thin and the bob is round, it will cut through the air easily and will not slow down the pendulum a great deal.
I took some preliminary experiments to see how the weight of the bob and the angle of the string affect the duration of one period. The difference in time between the lowest weight which was 10g and the highest weight which was150g was only 0.8 seconds for the 10 swings. I therefore think that there is not a lot of point in testing this as one of the variables. I next saw how the angle of string affected the time duration of one period; again there was no big difference in the time. I raised the string to horizontal and then let go, the difference between this and when I let the string go at almost vertical was only 0.4 seconds for the 10 swings, this is because the pendulum may be travelling faster when it is released at near horizontal but it has a lot further to go than when it is released at nearly vertical.
