Inaugural Lecture given by Professor Jeff Dunham

A Chaotic Pendulum Experiment

A chaotic pendulum apparatus will be described and demonstrated. The history of the phenomenon of chaos will be outlined with the goal of understanding why such a basic phenomenon was not understood fully until after modern developments in physics such as special relativity, general relativity, and quantum mechanics. Modern digital computers have been essential to the growth of our understanding of chaos and play a critical role in the analysis of data sets obtained from the chaotic pendulum apparatus. In particular, modern parallel computing techniques make it possible to analyze large data sets efficiently with modest computer resources.