Description:
Multiple exposures showing a penulum swinging. At one end of its axis it meets another steel ball and appears to bounce back off it.

Label Text:
When one imagines a pendulum, one often thinks of the passage of time. Yet here the pendulum is timeless—all of its stages appear at once. As it reaches the highest point it slows, while at the lowest it rushes by. Anything that swings—from the pendulum of a grandfather clock to a child on a swing—follows this pattern of motion. The contrast of the white ball on a stark black background focuses our eyes on the movement, making us look back and forth as if the pendulum was truly in motion.

-Charlotte Schmaltz ’21, Society of Physics Students, Mount Holyoke College (Oct. 2017)

Tags:
science; patterns; movement; paths

Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=MH+1983.21.6

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