Objective:
We will determine the acceleration of the weights of an Atwood’s Machine, both experimentally and theoretically. We will attempt to verify Newton’s Second law which is a mathematical statement relating force, mass, and acceleration. Newton’s Second law states that acceleration, a, is directly related to net force, F, and inversely related to mass, m. Naturally this give F=ma. Using the Atwood’s Machine experimental acceleration data (for 10 different runs with 10 different combinations of masses) will be gathered and compared to the theoretical acceleration which is predicted by Newton’s Second Law using a modified version of F=ma. The only two variables in this system system that we will control are the the two masses. We also know the value of gravity, which was set a 9.8 m/s2. We will see if the second law is if fact true via our experiment and we will test calculate the error of our findings when compared to the theoretical findings.

Discussion
Newton claims that the the acceleration of an object is directly proportional to the net force acting on it (in the direction of the net force) and that the acceleration is inversely proportional to the mass of the object. Or more simply stated F=ma. To verify this we used a pre-assembled Atwood’s Machine.
Our machine is a modern version of Rev. George Atwood’s original contraption. Ours uses a electronic seeing eye to detect spoke movement of the pulley. This information is used to by DataStudio to compute the acceleration of the the system of masses. This is a digital sensor so it was connected to a digital port of the interface box. We then had to input the spoke length for the pulley. This value is .0015 meters. The sensor did not need to be calibrated, so no calibration was done. We draped a long practically massless string over the pulley and attached a mass hanger on each end of the string. It