Huygens' synchronization experiment revisited: Luck or skill?
Jiao Yang, Yan Wang, Yizhen Yu, Jinghua Xiao, and Xingang Wang

TL;DR
This study revisits Huygens' synchronization experiment with modern methods, showing that deliberate frequency mismatch increases the likelihood of anti-phase synchronization, suggesting Huygens may have intentionally introduced such mismatch.
Contribution
The paper demonstrates experimentally and numerically that frequency mismatch enhances anti-phase synchronization, providing new insights into Huygens' original observations.
Findings
Frequency mismatch increases anti-phase synchronization probability.
Beyond a critical mismatch, synchronization states abruptly disappear.
Friction and precision influence the critical mismatch value.
Abstract
353 years ago, in a letter to the Royal Society of London, Christiaan Huygens described "an odd kind of sympathy" between two pendulums mounted side by side on a wooden beam, which inspired the modern studies of synchronization in coupled nonlinear oscillators. Despite the blooming of synchronization study in a variety of disciplines, the original phenomenon described by Huygens remains a puzzle to researchers. Here, by placing two mechanical metronomes on top of a freely moving plastic board, we revisit the synchronization experiment conducted by Huygens. Experimental results show that by introducing a small mismatch to the natural frequencies of the metronomes, the probability for generating the anti-phase synchronization (APS) state, i.e., the "odd sympathy" described by Huygens, can be clearly increased. By numerical simulations of the system dynamics, we conduct a detailed analysis…
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