MonoMonday: Chaos Theory

Apologies if you think I got carried away with this today ;-)

Having heard of Chaos Theory, but not knowing much about it, I turned to Wikipedia (as you do). Our mathematician Son (#2) who's staying with us at the moment helped me to understand a bit of it. Seemingly it relates to small changes (or errors) which can have big consequences (I guess that's why financial wizards who try to predict the consequences to the economy of small changes can usually get their predictions very wrong!).

Anyway, inspired by the Double Rod Pendulum seen in the Wikipedia article I tried to replicate it with Meccano, to see if I could get some nice chaotic effects. It took a bit of experimentation to get it to do what I wanted - using different lengths of girder and adding weights here and there. The pendulum can swing in one plane from the upper fulcrum and in another plane at the half-way-down joint. I taped a laser pointer to the lower end so that you could see the pattern generated on the floor, and used the "Live Composite" mode on the Olympus to record the pattern. Small changes in how I swung it certainly did produce very different patterns. This is the most chaotic-looking one I recorded.

(I know it's MonoMonday but red and black does of course still count as monochrome.)

(There's more about Double Rod Pendulums on a different Wikipedia page here.)

The extra shows 2 shots of the equipment, the left hand one "in situ" and the other held against a plain wall to allow better visibility of the details. (I simulated the laser beam on these as I had to use a clip to keep the laser button pressed, and it obscured the view for these photos so I took it off at this point. (And if you try this at home, take care not to look directly at the beam!)

Many thanks to our MM host Jensphotos for the inspiration for my blip!