If I had to pick an all-time favourite science experiment it would probably be
the Foucault pendulum because it is just so simple and elegant. But - at the same
time - I think the wow factor is usually lost on people. What it is, basically, is a
massive pendulum that allows for people to witness the earth as it rotates. My
next video is going to be entirely about how this experiment works but what you
need to know for now is that as the world turns, as it rotates, the pendulum
appears to move in a very slow big circle. But the problem with it is that
it happens on such a slow timescale, the rotation is slow, and it is kind of hard
for people to see what's happening without sitting there for hours at a
time. But I'm excited because in the project that I'm currently working on I
think I've found a way to actually visualize it. Now normally if you just
want to speed something up in video you can just take a time lapse but if you
did that with this you might get one frame while it's there and another while
it's there and the video would just end up being a total mess. What you need to
do is take a photo only when it's at its maximum end of its swing and repeat that
so that all you see is when it is precessing (when it is completing a
pendulum day). But in order to do that you need a lot of precision. At first I
thought I could just use a timer for that and then I realized that it would
need to be precise to the millisecond because if it was off by just a little
bit then over the course of a day - and it takes 32 hours here for it to go around
this circle - over that time it would drift out and my photos would again
become fairly random and it would look like chaos. However, in order to keep this
pendulum going forever there's actually an electromagnet that gives it a little
push every time it swings. It doesn't change the direction but it keeps it
moving. In order for that to happen there's
actually a magnet in the bottom of this the detects when the pendulum is at the
center, so I actually built an entire electronic setup and programmed it so
that it is using the swing of the pendulum to trigger the cameras to take
the photos at the exact right moment. What I'm excited about is A: it ends up
looking beautiful, and B: I'm actually going to have data to tell the
University the exact period of the pendulum over time which is kind of
awesome. In order to make this project one step more complicated I decided to
stay here with the pendulum for 32 hours and describe what's happening in real
time using animations. I'm not really sure if that's a good idea but that's
what I'm gonna do. A huge thanks to the University of Puget Sound for allowing
me to be here. Fun fact: this pendulum bob weighs nearly 60 kilograms. I couldn't
lift it. After being here continually for 28 hours
the pendulum day has completed four hours early which after talking with a
couple of the professors here I've learned is because we did not start the
pendulum off on a perfectly narrow plane and if there is any sort of oscillations
then it will change the duration of its precession. But I don't make these videos
in order to do science experiments I make them in order to show how science
works, so in order to do that, I got to say that sometimes science is just
really difficult, and it requires a lot of precision, and a lot of patience, and
sometimes it doesn't go as planned. In my last video I announced that I got
a new plant and I left it up to you to decide on a name you suggested over 70
names, and I'll let you vote on it. I let you decide. And you decided to name
it 'Tom Scott' which i think is hilarious if not a bit confusing
Tom: I hope you don't mind the we named a plant after you (!?). You people
are weird, but thanks for watching. If you press the subscribe button it will
literally put a single drop of water onto Tom Scott - the plant - which is what's
keeping the plant, Tom Scott, alive.. This is going to be confusing. oh boy. yeah. so....
press the button.