Mathematician and physicist — George Atwood (London, 1745 – London, 1807) was an English mathematician and physicist, educated and long active at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he became a well-regarded teacher known for his experimental demonstrations. He is remembered above all for devising, around 1784, the “Atwood machine”, a simple teaching apparatus for studying the laws of uniformly accelerated motion. The device, consisting of two masses joined by a string passing over a pulley, makes it possible to “slow down” the fall of bodies and to verify Newton’s second law quantitatively with the timekeeping instruments available at the time. His 1784 treatise on the rectilinear and rotational motion of bodies made the machine a classic teaching tool in mechanics, still used in school laboratories.
Theories and contributions
- Atwood machine — Two masses and joined by a string over a pulley: the reduced acceleration is , useful for verifying Newtonian dynamics.
Present in chapters
Linked atoms
3 linked atoms.