This Will Never Happen AgainCavon HajimiriAward: Top 100
School: polytechnic school Whether it was the trajectory of my football or the tilt of a seesaw, for me, Physics was always about prediction, but when I first read about Chaotic motion, it put that into question. How could Physics not predict a simple pendulum? Recently, the turbulent weather led me down a rabbit hole that renewed my interest in this question. To create this photo, I 3D printed my own double pendulum and mounted it to a wooden plank. In a dark room, I released the pendulum with a blue LED on, capturing its motion with a long exposure. I then quickly switched the LED to red and released the pendulum from the same starting point. The beauty of Chaos theory's sensitivity to initial conditions appears in two vastly different paths of the same pendulum, dropped from nearly identical points. Every swing displays the pendulum's interaction with gravity and friction, but even the slightest change in starting angle alters its entire path. Although the path is perfectly deterministic upon release, physics can't predict it, since the precision of initial measurement is finite, and the non-linear differential equation means it cannot be written as a function of time. There is something beautiful about unpredictability in Physics. No two swings of my pendulum are the same, and no long-exposure shot will ever replicate this. In the glow left behind by the double pendulum, I see not just physics, but an image showing how, from simple rules, a near infinite variety of outcomes can emerge. 
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