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Introduction
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Feynman's Wobbling Plate is a Java applet that simulates rotation of a symmetric rigid body moving freely in a free-float frame or fixed in its center of mass. In both cases its motion is not affected by any external torque.
We were inspired by the story told by a famous American physicist R. Feynman in his popular book Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! In this book author describes how he became interested in the movement of the freely falling plate which was thrown up by a student in Cornell cafeteria. As he says he noticed that the red medallion on the plate went around faster than the wobbling. Later he discovered that for small wobbles the medallion rotates twice as fast as the wobble rate. So the ratio of frequency of rotation to the frequency of wobbling is two to one. It is likely that Feynman hadn't recalled this event correctly, because in fact that ratio is one to two.
Alexander Tomori
tomal@centrum.sk
He is a senior student at the Gymnazium arm. gen. L. Svobodu in Humenne, Slovakia. He is quite a successful contestant in the Physics
Olympiad and in local programming competition Zenit.
Boris Gazovic
bgazovic@post.sk
He is a senior student at the Gymnazium arm. gen. L. Svobodu in Humenne, Slovakia. He is quite a successful contestant in the Physics Olympiad. He also took part in the International Physics Olympiad in Taiwan last year.
Consultant:
Dr. Slavomir Tuleja
tuleja@stonline.sk
He is a teacher of Physics and Mathematics at the Gymnazium arm. gen. L. Svobodu in Humenne, Slovakia. He deals with creating
web educational materials enhanced with Java applets for teaching of Physics and Mathematics.
In Humenne, Slovakia, 15th
february 2004
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This program uses some libraries from Open Source Physics Education project, that are available on the URL www.opensourcephysics.org and that can be redistributed and/or modified under the terms of the GNU General Public License, offline version.