PSN-L Email List Message

Subject: possible vertical using magnets?
From: Randall Peters PETERS_RD@..........
Date: Fri, 09 Nov 2007 14:40:43 -0500


Kay,
    We know how you feel, but here's one more  'drinnk from the firehose'.  We're 'on a roll', looks like.
Meredith, like yourself, I saw the need to somehow communicate pictures; so I've placed one on my webpage at:
http://physics.mercer.edu/hpage/psn/vertical-using-magnets.gif

Anybody know instinctively if it's fatally flawed?  I know Chris you don't like 'knife edges'.  Maybe they're not as bad with load reduction by the pulling shown here.  What about your thoughts, Charles, since I like your idea?

And Keith, we're not opposed at all to what you've mentioned.  I wrote a paper on the pendulum that moves in a way you'd like.  Check out the pages that result if you type 'rattle in Seattle' into Google.  I wouldn't be surprised if my
1988 paper "Chaotic motion from support constraints of a nondriven rigid spherical pendulum", Phys. Rev. A 38, 5352
prompted the commercial development that resulted in the 'oak and brass' pendulum that writes in sand and which recorded that Seattle earthquake.

Randall


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