The falling chain of Hopkins, Tait, Steele and Cayley

Abstract

A uniform, flexible and frictionless chain falling link by link from a heap by the edge of a table falls with an acceleration $g/3$ if the motion is nonconservative, but $g/2$ if the motion is conservative, $g$ being the acceleration due to gravity. Unable to construct such a falling chain, we use instead higher-dimensional versions of it. A home camcorder is used to measure the fall of a three-dimensional version called an $xyz$-slider. After frictional effects are corrected for, its vertical falling acceleration is found to be $a_x/g=0.328\pm 0.004$. This result agrees with the theoretical value of $a_x/g=1/3$ for an ideal energy-conserving $xyz$-slider.

17 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (2)

• Falling chains
• The motion of the freely falling chain tip

Cited by in corpus (3)

• The weight of a falling chain, revisited
• Chain Paradoxes
• Solving the paradox of the folded falling chain by considering horizontal kinetic energy and link geometry