A plucked guitar string can vibrate for seconds before falling silent. A playground swing, emptied of its passenger, will gradually come to rest. These are what physicists call "damped harmonic ...

A strong permanent magnet acts as a simple pendulum, swinging back and forth while hanging from strings. A copper plate underneath the magnet can be moved up to tune the eddy current damping. Swing ...

Shock absorbers transmit some of the shock directly to the isolated part. Engineers can mitigate the problem by adding dampers or with complex control systems, but the self-damped air spring offers a ...