Question

As the astronaut chose for the one-way mission to Mars, one of your tasks is to measure g. You have a long very thin wire labelled “1 g/m”, and a 125 g weight. You have an accurate chronometer, but forgot a meter stick, so you fold the wire in two to find its centre. You attach one end of the wire to the wall, stretch it horizontally to pass over a pulley at its midpoint, then suspend the weight on the freely hanging end. By vibrating the wire and timing you find the wire’s second harmonic frequency to be 100 Hz. You now remove the pulley and make a pendulum out of the wire+suspended mass, and measure the time to make 100 oscillations as 314 seconds. What value of g will you calculate with your experimental results? (hint: look back at your notes for Chapter 14 for the period of a pendulum).

Answer 1