Nathan Vander Wilt3d ago

kids came up with a great idea during their physics lesson:

they were supposed to calculate a gravitational constant based on a pendulum set up.

this was a most demotivating kind of "science" since obvs way more promising work has already been put into making a very correct and very precise answer very widely available. so the thing felt like an exercise only in NOT using Wikipedia to them.

so they used the known gravitational constant to calculate the unknown length of the string instead! 😆💪

Show threadNathan Vander Wilt
(the answer was off by about a centimeter over the ~60cm length of string so all the Life Lessons about experimental setup and data collection and measurement accuracy, etc. are still emergent. it perhaps forgets and flips backwards the history of discovery but retrospect has a way of doing that regardless.)
Mar 20 at 6:34pmWeb
Show threadDaniel Berman3d ago
@natevw Still not bad. I would be curious if the margin of error held with multiples or a fraction of the string length.