This one has fun motion science in it! First, I needed 15 metal washers of the same size. I looked everywhere but I could not find anything to suit my needs. So I decided to try it with metal nuts (because I read the experiment, I understood that I could do this without effecting the outcome.) However, I STILL didn’t have enough of the same sized nuts. This is where my years of math experience came in. I knew that I needed a 1 to 14 ratio of the weight of the nuts. I weighted one nut to be 4 grams and 14 times 4 is 56. With this knowledge, I gathered the different sized nuts and made it exactly 56 grams. Thus, even though I did not have the same size of nuts, I just made sure the weight was the same which was the important thing. YAY! Math saved me from running to Home Depot!
By tying one nut (4g) on one end of a 27inch string and tying the others (56g) on the other end. It came out like this, it had a 1:14 weight ratio.
Now, what am I am going to do with this? Well, as you might have guessed, I am going to make a pendulum. What is so exciting about that? Actually, I find pendulums fun to play with, but this I haven’t done before.
I pointed my index finger and pull the heavy end all the way up to where it was touching my finger. Then, I let go of the single nut and let the other end fall. The heavy end falls very quickly! It took my a few tries to get it right. But look…
The heavy end never touched the ground!!! The light end swung around my finger and caught the heavy end. This shows that the small can be mighty!! It was fun to do.
By swinging (like a pendulum) the small nut wrapped around my finger (some tries a couple of times and other tries many times!) and stopped the heavy end by taking away the string so that it could move towards the ground.
In the book, this experiment ends the chapter "Science in Motion". The next experiment, we will begin the chapter "Must-See Science"!
The WOW-rating I give a 5. I am tempted to go and try other objects around the house! See if a spoon can catch a mug or if a pencil can catch a book. It just has to be a 1 to 14 weight ratio or else it may not work…… or will it?
