Pendulum Mystery

Scientists from the University of Lisbon, Portugal have decoded a 350-year-old mystery – why pendulum clocks hanging from the same wall synchronise over time. It is no mystery that pendulum clocks hanging from the same wall start swinging in exactly the opposite direction after half an hour, no matter what their position was at the beginning.

Inventor of pendulum clock, Christiaan Huygens stated this phenomenon as “odd kind of sympathy” but could not explain the reason behind this movement. Earlier experiments showed that two pendulum clocks on the same beam influenced each other through small forces exerted on the beam. This is when scientists Henrique Oliveira and Luis Melo, thought of identifying the reason behind this unusual characteristic.

Scientists in this particular experiment analysed two pendulum clocks on a wall. As the experiment proceeded they calculated the movement of the pendulum back and forth and discovered that sound pulses travelling through the wall from clock to clock interfered with the swings of the pendulum. This caused them to synchronise. They further experimented the pendulum clocks after attaching them to an aluminium rail fixed on a wall. The results revealed that changes in the speed of pendulum swings coincided with cycles of sound pulses. 

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