Your challenge for this laboratory period will be to design and execute an experiment that will demonstrate that the net force on a system in static equilibrium is 0. You will be expected to pay particular attention to the problems of accuracy and precision. The following information is presented to give you some guidance, on possible alternatives, but part of your grade will be based on your experimental design.
Force is a vector quantity, having magnitude and direction.
Using the force table apparatus, several forces can be applied to the small circular ring such that the total force on the ring is zero. The system is then in a state of static equilibrium. The magnitude of each force acting on the ring can be represented by the total amount of mass attached to a particular string. The direction of each force can be determined by measuring the angle from the x-axis that a particular string makes. This occurs when the ring is exactly centered on the center stop.