Counting Swing Cycles
by Eva
A curious thing about the physics of a swing is that the amount of time it takes to swing a full cycle is independent of your mass or of how high you are swinging. People can synchronize and get melodic rewards ♫♫ on our swings, even if one person swings dangerously high and the other timidly low. Their swing cycle times are theoretically the same because a swing acts as a simple pendulum – a mass attached to a pivot – and all you need to calculate a pendulum’s cycle time is the length of the pendulum and the local acceleration of gravity.
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