A pendulum wave device makes an abstract physics idea — that period depends on length — directly visible. Release 21 pendulums of slightly different lengths from the same angle at the same instant, and their gradually diverging periods carry them out of sync, then back into sync, tracing traveling-wave and standing-wave patterns as they go.
The mechanism
Twenty-one independent revolute joints hang off a single shared support beam, each one a
simple pendulum swinging on its own — 21 degrees of freedom, with no coupling or
<mimic> relationship between them. Every pendulum’s length is 1% shorter than its neighbor
toward one end of the row, which is what staggers their periods and produces the wave effect
once they’re set in motion.
About this file
This is an ARMOR original — drafted with the help of Google Gemini and hosted directly in this gallery rather than linking out to a third-party repository, since there isn’t one. It’s released into the public domain (CC0 1.0): use it, remix it, or build your own variation with no attribution required.