Related papers: Revisiting Riccioli's free fall calculations
The Italian astronomer Giovanni Battista Riccioli is commonly credited with performing the first precise experiments to determine the acceleration of a freely falling body. Riccioli has been discussed by historians of science, sometimes…
The Italian astronomer Giovanni Battista Riccioli is commonly credited with performing the first precise experiments to determine the acceleration of a freely falling body, but he also went further, experimentally investigating what today…
The most common way to find gravitational acceleration, g, in a laboratory is to use a simple pendulum and a clock. Alternately, g can be calculated by measuring time and distance for a free fall. Since the time of free fall in a laboratory…
In 1626, the Venetian physician Santorio Santorio published the details of his pulsilogium, a stop clock that could accurately measure one's pulse rate. He applied Galileo Galilei's insights that the frequency of a pendulum's oscillation is…
In this paper, we calculate the gravitational acceleration by using simple pendulums within the designated World Pendulum Alliance: a network constituted by fourteen institutions in eight countries, each provided by a pendulum that can be…
In the course of basic physics, more precisely the course of classical mechanics should be understood as clearly as possible the subject of rotational dynamics for students of science and engineering, to have clarity with the issues…
This study focuses on evaluating three methods used to determine the theoretical gravity in the city of Cusco and their importance in distance education. The first method is based on Newton's law of universal gravitation, obtaining a…
Einstein's explanation of Mercury's perihelion motion has been verified by astronomical observations. His formula could also be obtained in Schwarzschild metric and was published already in 1898. Motion along a straight geodesic, however,…
Difficulties presented by students on the concept of instantaneous velocity are well known. This is in part due to instantaneous speed being often defined in terms of the notion of mathematical limit, which may not be clear to many students…
A simple approximation formula is derived here for the dependence of the period of a simple pendulum on amplitude that only requires a pocket calculator and furnishes an error of less than 0.25% with respect to the exact period. It is shown…
This paper presents the validation of a computational tool that serves to obtain continuous measurements of moving objects. The software uses techniques of computer vision, pattern recognition and optical flow, to enable tracking of objects…
The period of oscillation of a simple pendulum ($T = 2\pi\sqrt{l/g}$) is a familiar formula to the average first-year physics student. However, deriving this expression from first principles involves solving a non-linear differential…
About 300 experiments have tried to determine the value of the Newtonian gravitational constant, G, so far, but large discrepancies in the results have made it impossible to know its value precisely. The weakness of the gravitational…
G. B. Riccioli's 1651 Almagestum Novum contains a table of diameters of stars measured by Riccioli and his associates with a telescope. These telescopically measured star diameters are spurious, caused by the diffraction of light waves…
Precision absolute gravity measurements are growing in importance, especially in the context of the new definition of the kilogram. For the case of free-fall absolute gravimeters with a Michelson-type interferometer tracking the position of…
We determined the Newtonian Constant of Gravitation G by interferometrically measuring the change in spacing between two free-hanging pendulum masses caused by the gravitational field from large tungsten source masses. We find a value for G…
To measure oscillation of a simple pendulum was probably a first idea coming to mind after appearance of smartphones with small but powerful acceleration sensors~: Simply attach the telephone to a playground swing or hang it on two string…
The paper proposes an alternative to the Foucault pendulum for detecting various movements of rotation of the Earth. Calculations suggest that if the duration of a "free" fall becomes longer the eastward deflection will be amplified in…
An important scientific debate took place regarding falling bodies hundreds of years ago, and it still warrants introspection. Galileo argued that in a vacuum all bodies fall at the same rate relative to the earth, independent of their…
The nearly-incessant free oscillations of the Earth (not the larger, long-lived normal modes seen following intense quakes) were first observed by accident in the record of a tilt-sensitive instrument designed to study surface physics.…