I have very little knowledge of physics but don’t fully understand how a weight can serve to power a pendulum clock without verging on something like perpetual motion, which I know is of course impossible. How can a pendulum keep swinging almost indefinitely like that? And if a pendulum can use gravity to power itself, why can’t we use gravity to power larger scale devices?
In: Physics
The pendulum lowers down just a tiny bit every swing, just enough to keep it going. Every so often (day to few days) the user needs to wind it back up, which brings the pendulum upwards and ready to slowly fall again.
I’ve also seen some pendulum clocks that are battery powered, supplying just enough energy to keep the pendulum swinging until the battery runs out.
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