Double Pendulums - Chaotic, and Visualized
Pendulums - a weight suspended from a pivot point - are easy. You learn about them pretty early on in physics, and move on to other stuff pretty rapidly But a double pendulum - a pendulum with another pendulum attached to its end - well boy howdy, is it ever something else! via Revolution Analytics , we have this awesome animated gif of a double pendulum in action - chaos personified. For more detail, go check out Wikipedia , which will tell you such fun stuff as [a double pendulum] is a simple physical system that exhibits rich dynamic behavior with a strong sensitivity to initial conditions. [1] The motion of a double pendulum is governed by a set of coupled ordinary differential equations . For certain energies its motion is chaotic . and so on. Fun stuff! (the below is what you get when you stick LEDs on one of them...)