Photo: Rhett Allain. Double Pendulum

Finding the Equation of Motion for a Double Pendulum

Rhett Allain
13 min readDec 28, 2021

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The double pendulum is just like a pendulum, but doubled. Ha. No, it’s a pendulum on the end of a pendulum. You often see this in your classical mechanics class — but the solution isn’t exactly trivial. It is also used as an example of chaotic motion. Finally, one more comment before we get into the details. Although the double pendulum is fairly popular, it’s actually not so trivial to build a real…

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Rhett Allain

Physics faculty, science blogger of all things geek. Technical Consultant for CBS MacGyver and MythBusters. WIRED blogger.