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Atwood's Machine

A basic example in Newtonian mechanics is Atwood's machine, which consists of a pulley and two masses. The problem is to calculate the acceleration of the masses. (Their magnitudes are equal but are of opposite sign.) If the masses are equal, the system remains in equilibrium. Note that the time to fall is not "real time".

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DETAILS

The acceleration is defined as where and are the left and right masses in kg and is the acceleration due to gravity.

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"Atwood's Machine" from the Wolfram Demonstrations Project
 http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/AtwoodsMachine/
Contributed by: Enrique Zeleny
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