Brainstorm Clock Experiment

On Tuesday in lab, we were first asked to brainstorm ideas for clocks. Some of the things we thought of that could be used as a clock were a simple pendulum, sun dial, your pulse, and drips from a leaky faucet. Then, we spent the rest of our time testing out the drippy faucet idea by poking a hole in the bottom of a cup, placing it above a graduated cylinder, filling it with water, and timing how long it took for the drips to fill up 10mL. While the hole was dripping out water, we had to continually put more water in the cup so that the pressure was consistent throughout the entire experiment. If we did not do this, the water could drip faster or slower depending on how much water was in the cup. We tested the amount of time it took to get

This helped us realize that a drippy faucet was an accurate clock. Lastly, we created sundials by tracing a protractor and then marking off intervals of 15 degrees, which were the time intervals starting with 6AM on the left side and ending with 6PM on the right. Then we stuck the screw through the paper in the middle of the bottom straight line.

Thursday in lab, we first found the spring constant of our spring hooked onto our stand by timing the period it took for a 50g weight to oscillate back and forth. We timed the oscillation ten time and then found the average which was .77 seconds. We then used this information along with a formula to find the spring constant which we found to be 3,329.26 g/s^2. We then repeated this same experiment with a 100 g weight, and found the spring constant to be 3,580.8 g/s^2. Since these numbers are roughly the same, we know that our true spring constant is around these two numbers. Next, we timed the oscillation of a 100 g weight hooked onto a 29 cm string. After ten trials we found the average time period for the 100g weight to be 1.24 seconds. Then we tested the 50g weight and found the average period to be 1.17 seconds. As you can see, even though we changed the mass, the period of time it