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I am wondering whether there exists a spring that behaves like those shown in a multitude of physics textbooks, where a mass stretched/compressed to a certain point oscillates back and forth in some way. Is it even physically viable for a spring to behave that way when connected on one end to a solid, immovable entity, and on the other to a mass lying upon a low-friction surface? I have only seen springs that strictly compress or stretch, but not both, so the image of the spring block oscillator with both compression and stretching properties is baffling. Is there a real-world example of this, or a good explanation of why it cannot actually occur?

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  • $\begingroup$ The harmonic oscillator is an idealization that works well for a number of systems. If you wanted to engineer a really good one (in terms of linearity and absence of secondary modes), you would probably go for an electrical implementation, rather than a mechanical one. $\endgroup$
    – CuriousOne
    Commented Mar 31, 2016 at 3:10

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Yes, there are springs design to work well in both compression and tension, though they generally

  1. cost a fair amount, and
  2. will extend farther than they will compress.

But it's hard to set up the one-sided horizontal arrangement shown in books because of the springs tendency to buckle as well as the difficulty in removing friction from the spring's interaction with the surface. The two sided version is easy to realize on the bench (you just sum the spring constants), as is the vertical one-sided arrangement. Of course it take a little more math to show that the vertical problem is completely equivalent to the horizontal one.

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