When a guitar string is plucked or a playground swing is set in motion, the movement gradually fades away. Physicists call these “damped harmonic oscillators,” and Newton’s laws do a fine job of ...

A magnetic mass hangs on the end of a swinging rod. A movable copper plate damps the oscillations. The rod is connected to a rotational motion sensor, which can transmit the data to a computer for ...

University of Vermont professor Dennis Clougherty (right) and his student Nam Dinh wondered if there are systems in the atomic scale that behave like the vibrating motion of a guitar string in the ...