No. No! This isn't named after the philosopher Foucault
It’s named after the book by Umberto Eco, which is a pen name Dan Brown sometimes uses for his more esoteric and intelligent writing.
Foucault pendulum
31–37 of 37 posts
Re: Foucault pendulum
#32I found it very difficult to understand WHY Foucaults pendulum behaves the way it does. I could picture what was happening with the pendulum at the Norh Pole... earth rotates under the pivot point every 24 hours. And, I understand what happened st the Equator... no effect on the pendulum as nothing is rotating beneath it. But, at points in between, it was hard to understand why the pendulum might only rotate 80% or s…
Here's the intuition that clicked for me, similar to the above but with a different twist at the end. Imagine a large flat parking lot, and drive around the parking lot in a circle. Say you have a small pendulum swinging freely, suspended in your car. If you drive the full 360 degrees, the pendulum will appear from the reference frame of the inside of the car to have rotated a full 360 degrees. (Let's say that you ar…
This would make for a great 3blue1brown visualization.
Re: Foucault pendulum
#33TIL the smithsonian removed it's Foucault pendulum in 1998 (right about when I moved away from the DC area). It was about 15 meters long and quite impressive; they had little pins setup that it would knock down, so you could look at when you arrived in the museum and see the difference when you left.
During the Kent state protest march on Washington, a group of us from Stony Brook got close to the pegs on our bellies looking up at the impressive pendulum fly by just over our heads.
Re: Foucault pendulum
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. People have been taught that the earth revolves around the sun, and sometimes we use it as a way to be smug about how much smarter we are than the ancients. But schools do a huge disservice to students by not showing them that there's not in fact any way to know this from the information the ancients had available to them. About all you can infer from the way the sun changes position in the sky is that some kind…
They certainly could and in fact did. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliocentrism#Aristarchus_of_S...
Did Aristarchus of Samos develop a model that made any predictions that could be verified? I think that the ancients thinking about heliocentrism were mostly contemplating it as philosophy. The section you linked doesn't say anything about evidence for heliocentrism, which is what 'jschwartzi is saying was lacking.
Stuff like parallax and Foucault's pendulum isn't obvious until it's already been seen, and AFAIK wasn't investigated until the 17th century.
Re: Foucault pendulum
#35I found it very difficult to understand WHY Foucaults pendulum behaves the way it does. I could picture what was happening with the pendulum at the Norh Pole... earth rotates under the pivot point every 24 hours. And, I understand what happened st the Equator... no effect on the pendulum as nothing is rotating beneath it. But, at points in between, it was hard to understand why the pendulum might only rotate 80% or s…
Here's the intuition that clicked for me, similar to the above but with a different twist at the end. Imagine a large flat parking lot, and drive around the parking lot in a circle. Say you have a small pendulum swinging freely, suspended in your car. If you drive the full 360 degrees, the pendulum will appear from the reference frame of the inside of the car to have rotated a full 360 degrees. (Let's say that you ar…
I had heard it explained explained that way as well. Made sense then and now.
Not to digress, but IF the earth was stationary and everything rotated around it, can you think of a mechanism to explain the pendulums behavior? (Could be ether, or some medieval conception of ptolemic shells, you name it... but it has to be consistent and sort of reasonable sounding.)
Re: Foucault pendulum
#36Re: Foucault pendulum
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thank you! I live in Boston and am a frequent visitor to the Museum of Science, which has a Foucault pendulum. I never truly grasped the explanation until reading your post.
Thanks. I found that explanation a long time ago in some remote corner of the internet... some Japanese website about Transformers and Decipticons as I recall. Ages ago -- when the Internet was young -- I tried to put the explanation in the Foucaults article on Wikipedia... it lasted about 30 minutes before getting deleted and replaced with the usual trig stuff.
> lasted about 30 minutes before getting deleted and replaced
My one and only attempt to edit Wikipedia was to redact a statement on the article about the Semantic Web that had recently been changed to note that someone named Dr. Foch was attempting to weaponize the semantic web in support of a Chinese takeover of the world. My edit was immediately removed for not having a valid reference...nevermind that the original note didn't either.