Results and Conclusions

The measurement obtained for the force of gravity was lower than the expected value. The measured value for g was 9.749 Newtons which was 0.5% lower than the expected 9.799 Newtons. The error is likely to be found in the length measurement of the wire. It was difficult to determine the center of mass of the system, so there is no real way to tell how much error was added to the measurement of g. Additionally, the tools to measure the wire were less than ideal. The measuring tape could only measure precisely to about a centimeter. This level of precision is not adequate for a 1/10000 measurement of gravity. The standard deviation for the time was 0.0022 seconds with a total number of periods taken being 468. This was an attempt to take care of the low precision in the length measurement. By getting a smaller uncertainty in the timing information, the higher uncertainty in the length measurement would not have affected the total uncertainty in g.