How Long Can You Balance a Pencil?
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Balancing a pencil or any other top heavy object on its tip is quiet precarious taskIt's easy to see why top heavy objects are unstableThey just...Wanna fall downAny little nudge will put it off balancewith gravity happy to pull its center of mass even more off balance and the more off balance it is, the more gravity pulls until...Physicist call this kind of tipping an Inverted pendulum, becouse it´s kind of like upside down pendulum.And careful mathematical analysis of inverted pendulums will tell you the obvious:They're really unstable. In fact, these equations predict that if a perfectly balanced pencil with a perfectly sharp tipwere to get nudged off balance by just 1/10000th of the width of an atom,it would take only three seconds to fall over.The...
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Balancing a pencil or any other top heavy object on its tip is quiet precarious taskIt's easy to see why top heavy objects are unstableThey just...Wanna fall downAny little nudge will put it off balancewith gravity happy to pull its center of mass even more off balance and the more off balance it is, the more gravity pulls until...Physicist call this kind of tipping an Inverted pendulum, becouse it´s kind of like upside down pendulum.And careful mathematical analysis of inverted pendulums will tell you the obvious:They're really unstable. In fact, these equations predict that if a perfectly balanced pencil with a perfectly sharp tipwere to get nudged off balance by just 1/10000th of the width of an atom,it would take only three seconds to fall over.The...
