Oscillators make the best clocks.
[Intro Airplane Mode by Josh Woodward]
Instead of humans making candle after candle,
flipping sand, or refilling water jugs, they
decided to make machines do the repetitive
work and counting for them.
Humans wanted something that oscillates.If you are on a swing and somebody give you a good push,
will swing back and forth for awhile but you are going to slow down and eventually stop.
We are going to monitor this motion using a pendulum and a Hall effect sensor.
A Hall Effect sensor can sense whether a magnet is present or not.
We can make a pendulum from a string, a weight, and a magnet.
Each time the pendulum swings back and forth, the distance it goes is going to get smaller and smaller.
so we are going to place the Hall Effect sensor at the midpoint.
The Hall Effect sensors can count the number of swings your pendulum has.
We can change the weight at the end of the string.
The length of the string.
Or how far back you pull it.
You can see if these changes have any affect on how your pendulum acts.
We still need something to push the pendulum, because we want the oscillations to happen at regular intervals.
So we are going to build an escapement. This is going to give the pendulum regulated nudges.
We need something to power the escapement.  We can unravel a string attached to a weight or unwind a spring.
The final element we need is something to count the ticks and keep track of the time.
We've greatly increased our timekeeping abilities since our last episode, but we still encounter
a lot of issues when trying to keep a constant and accurate time.
Any differences in machining can cause time to drift. Changes in temperature will cause the swing to lengthen and shorten.
Parts will wear out. And all of these small inconsistencies will add up over time.
It was discovered that some
crystals, such as Quartz, vibrate when you put
small amounts of electrical current through them. These vibrations can be counted.
This method of timekeeping is used by devices such as your phone and your computer, but like
mechanical clocks, these wear over time, but at a much slower rate.
Some impurities in the crystal can also cause time to drift.
Now humans track the oscillations of atoms with lasers. This is the new
standard for timekeeping, but not practical
for indivuaul use.
If you do any of these pendulum experiments, please let us know in the comments below or on any of these social media platforms.
You can support us at Patreon.com/SciJoy.
And remember, keep exploring.
