Golf Ball Pendulums Shapeshift And Form Amazing Spirals

Pendulum is a weight suspended from a pivot so that it can swing freely. When a pendulum is displaced sideways from its resting, equilibrium position, it is subject to a restoring force due to gravity that will accelerate it back toward the equilibrium position.

This is a series of 15 pendulums using golf balls. The shortest pendulum swings 57 times per minute. The next shortest one swings 56 times per minute, and so on, down to 43 swings per minute. This creates some pretty cool effects, the two most ostensible being that at 30 seconds, as consecutive pendulums are at opposing positions in their swings, and at 60 seconds, all 15 pendulums are in sync as they were when they started. All told, this took about 20 hours to construct and tune. The tuning had to be accurate down to the millimeter to obtain the precision observed!

When released, the restoring force acting on the pendulum's mass causes it to oscillate about the equilibrium position, swinging back and forth. The time for one complete cycle, a left swing and a right swing, is called the period. The period depends on the length of the pendulum and also to a slight degree on the amplitude, the width of the pendulum's swing.

In recent years, dramatic breakthroughs in science and technology have completely transformed our understanding of the golf swing. There is one phenomenon, however, that might deserve the label of “the secret” of power in the golf swing, and that’s the compound pendulum effect.