

2pED7. 15 minutes of chaos.

Murray S. Korman


Lawrence A. Crum

Univ. of Washington, Seattle, WA 98105

Apparatus (both mechanical and electrical) will be presented to illustrate the complexities of a certain nonlinear behavior termed as chaos. In this demonstration, you will see a ``chaos man'' (a store bought sticklike compound pendulum) oscillate with a very complex motion. A simple pendulum will be made to oscillate (inverted) with the pivot at the bottom and the mass at the top. An electric circuit (modeling a nonlinear mechanical system) will be used to demonstrate chaotic behavior---which occurs when the system is driven with sufficient amplitude at certain frequencies.