Why is the vibration in my wire acting so oddly?
I was soldering a very thin wire today, and when I had one end firmly soldered, I accidentally bumped the wire diagonally with my tweezers. What I'd expect to happen is that the wire oscillates for a little while in one axis, then stops. However, what actually occurred is quite different and much more interesting! I recorded it in real-time; https://youtu.be/O5nFNly7L7s (sorry for the poor macro focus), and recorded it again at 480FPS and imported it into Tracker video analysis; https://youtu.be/9jhDsypkqKQ.
As you can see, the rotational motion fully reverses!
Here are some still frames from Tracker:
The wire begins to rotate clockwise after being excited:
The wire begins to oscillate in one axis:
And, mindbogglingly, begins to rotate counterclockwise!
(clearer views in the videos above)
The X and Y axis motion plotted by tracker raises even more questions:
As you can see, the X axis motion simply stops, then restarts!
What's going on?
My first thought was that (because this wire wasn't originally straight) there was some sort of unusual standing wave set up, but this occurs even with a completely straight wire.
I'm absolutely sure there's something about two-axis simple harmonic motion that I'm missing, but I just cannot think of what is causing this. I've seen many other "home-experiment" questions on this site, so I thought this would an acceptable question; I hope it's not breaking any rules.
EDIT:
Okay, I've got some more data! I've set up a little solenoid plunger system that produces no torque or two-axis motion, and it's very repeatable. Here: https://youtu.be/ZAni6VMOVD8
What I've noticed is that I can get almost any wire (even with a 90-degree bend!) to exhibit single-axis motion with this setup, with no spinning or deviation; and if I try enough, the same thing can happen with the tweezers. It seems like if I slide the tweezers slightly when exciting the wire, I can reliably produce this odd motion. 53
I don't know what that indicates.
EDIT2:
Okay, seems like with the plunger-solenoid I still can get this circular motion even with a straight wire.
EDIT3:
Okay, so I wanted to test <PERSON>'s suggestion once and for all. I assume that changing the moment of inertia to torsion of the wire would affect his theory, so I soldered a small piece of wire perpendicularly to the end of the main wire:
Then I recorded the motion;
And then I took off the perpendicular wire, and re-recorded the data: And then I did it again (got noisy data first time):
EDIT N: The final test!
<PERSON>'s hypothesis requires that the resonant frequency of a wire in each cardinal direction be different. To measure this, I used my solenoid setup that did not cause rotation, as above. I put a straight piece of wire between a light source and a light-dependent resistor and connected it to an oscilloscope;
The signal was very faint (42 millivolts), but my scope was able to pull it out of the noise. I have determined this:
In the +x direction, the resonant frequency of a just-straightened straight sample wire (unknown cycle frequency) is 51.81hz,+/-1hz;
In the +y direction, the resonant frequency of a sample wire is 60.60hz,+/-1hz;
So there's definitely a significant difference (~10 percent!) between the cardinal directions. Good enough proof for me.
EDIT N+1:
Actually, since my light detector above produces two pulses per sine wave, the actual vibration frequency is f/2; so the actual frequencies are 25.5 hz, and 30hz, which agrees roughly with @floris's data. 628