Smile of Chaos
Jia Shenai
Award: Top 100
School: metea valley high school
Teacher: john aister
Category: Contrived
Photo #20923
Smile of Chaos
Chaos usually looks messy, but in this image it almost seems to smile.
The design results from the nonlinear behavior of a double pendulum, where I attached LED lights to the ends of both arms and took a long-exposure photo. While a single pendulum has one primary angle of swing, a double pendulum consists of two connected pendulums. The lower arm oscillates from the endpoint of the upper arm, meaning its pivot is constantly moving and accelerating as the system swings. Energy transfers between gravitational potential energy and kinetic energy as the double pendulum falls and rises again. This causes chaotic motion because of the coupling between the two arms of the pendulum. The movement is characterized by the speeding up, slowing down, looping, and changing directions of the LED lights.
This image demonstrates deterministic chaos. Although the chaotic behavior may appear random, the movement follows several forces and principles, including gravity, torque, tension, and conservation of energy, with small losses due to friction. In addition, while the smile appears randomly in the pattern, it resulted from sensitivity to the initial conditions. Therefore, even a slight alteration of the starting point of the movement would have caused a different pattern to emerge. In that way, the smile is a reminder that even unpredictable motion can create something recognizable and human. What begins as disorder becomes expression, turning the physics of motion into an unexpected smile.
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