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Investigating · validations

Double pendulum

Is the double pendulum chaotic — does a hair's-breadth difference in where you release it change everything?

▶ Launch the interactive simulation

How the lab tests it

Swing a bright pendulum next to a faint ghost released δ=0.004 rad away (watch them split), and quantify it with a Benettin twin started δ₀=1e-8 away — renormalise the phase-space separation and average its log-growth into the largest Lyapunov exponent λ.

What it looks for

λ > 0 (exponential divergence ⇒ deterministic chaos / sensitive dependence) at large amplitude, vs λ ≈ 0 (two coupled normal modes) for a gentle release

This is one world in the PHS lab — 91 interactive simulations, each posing a question and measuring the answer. See the catalogued findings.