In Strogatz’s book, Synch, he has a nice description of how this phenomenon caused problems for Huygens when he was trying to develop accurate pendulum clocks. Huygens couldn’t figure out why his pendulums would tick in phase (or 180 degrees out of phase).
Alex
Wonderful.
This reminds me of a nice problem with ideal oscillators coupled by energy-dissipating springs. In that system all eigenfunctions except one where oscillators move in-phase dissipate.
What puzzles me though is why we have such specific case of energy loss in the system shown on the video?
Related: http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_strogatz_on_sync.html
In Strogatz’s book, Synch, he has a nice description of how this phenomenon caused problems for Huygens when he was trying to develop accurate pendulum clocks. Huygens couldn’t figure out why his pendulums would tick in phase (or 180 degrees out of phase).
Wonderful.
This reminds me of a nice problem with ideal oscillators coupled by energy-dissipating springs. In that system all eigenfunctions except one where oscillators move in-phase dissipate.
What puzzles me though is why we have such specific case of energy loss in the system shown on the video?