Some craziness during physics lab. - Page 2

On February 18 2009 23:44 Maenander wrote:

It´s not bad to get it out of an experiment.

To SkyLark: nice work, some comments:

Think about it, if pi^2 would not be nearly equal to g, you could still add in a factor to make it equal. You can always multiply by one. What you did here was an approximation (pi^2 ~= g, 4.003~=4). So in a way your approach was correct and it obviously must lead to the right conclusion. (though you are a bit "lucky" that the errors in both of your approximations cancel each other out)

On the other hand, you could take the formula T=2*pi*sqrt(L/g) as given and actually measure g at your location from the slope (4.003 or whatever) of your curve. As you have seen, it´s very close to pi^2 though.

edit: haha you DID get that slope from experiment, didn´t you? Otherwise what you did is circular reasoning ^^