pit and the pendulum project
The Pit and the Pendulum project was inspired by a conundrum that exist within the tales of Edgar Allan Poe, and how a man would potentially die unless he were able to escape his bondages in time. The story goes like this, a man is tied down to a bench and will be cut in half by a 30 foot pendulum that is hanging above him, he roughly has 12 vibrations left before the blade touches him. Meanwhile the man is trying to get his bonds cut off by rats, that will chew through them in approximately 1 minute. The question that was posed to us is if the man would be able to escape in time, or if he would be killed before he could escape. Throughout this unit we went about studying the way in which pendulums work and we also focused on learning about statistics and probability. This was what would allows us to determine wether or not he would be able to escape, and by the end of the unit we kind of had an answer. The thing is that, a pendulum can be either measured by the period or number of swings, and we get told that he has about 12 vibrations. This could be either one of the measurements. If we were measuring by swing he would not be capable of surviving because he would be out of time. But if we were to be measuring by period, the man would have more than enough time to have his bondages chewed off and for him to escape unscathed.