Posted on 03 April 2011 at 17:12h

Last week my first year classes were doing a design experiment with a rubber bung on  an elastic band. It's quite a good example and students don't find it too difficult to come up with interesting and do-able research questions. A lot of the experiments revolve around oscillations, often related to the length of time for the oscillations to die out rather than the frequency of the oscillation.
Why is that?
We hardly mention damping but everyone wants to do research questions related to it. Maybe it's a misunderstanding of what time period is?
One of the students was measuring the time period for the oscillation of the bung on one elastic. This oscillated pretty fast so went over to see how he was timing it. Actually, to be honest  went over to point out that it wasn't possible to count so fast. To my surprise he was able to count so fast by counting every 4 oscillations. The student in question (It's Oliver) is a pretty good musician and was able to recognise when there had been 4 oscillations without actually counting them. Quite a neat trick.  I bet Richard Feynman could do that too.