Foucault Pendulum
Related Category: Astronomy: General
see pendulum.
More on Foucault Pendulum
Pendulum - a mass, called a bob, suspended from a fixed point so that it can swing in an arc determined by its momentum and the force of gravity.
Foucault pendulum
Pendulum that varies the direction of its swing as Earth rotates. Used to demonstrate that Earth rotates, not the sky.
FOUCAULT PENDULUM
A Foucault pendulum is a simple pendulum (a weight on a long string attached to a support) that tracks the rotation of the Earth. As the pendulum swings, the Earth rotates under the pendulum, so the pendulum seems to rotate.
Foucault pendulum
The Foucault pendulum , or Foucault's pendulum, named after the French physicist L?on Foucault, was conceived as an experiment to demonstrate the Earth's rotation....
) are required to prove otherwise.
The plane of a Foucault pendulum only rotates with a period equal to the Earth's sidereal period (23hrs 56min) at the poles. At lower latitudes, the period is (23h 56m)/sin(latitude), and at the equator, the plane doesn't rotate at all.
Jean Bernard Léon Foucault (1819-1868) was a French physicist who was the first to demonstrate how a pendulum could track the rotation of the Earth (the Foucault pendulum) in 1851.
The pendulum appears to rotate westward with a period that depends on the latitude: rotation period = (23h 56m)/sin(latitude), where ``sin'' is the trigonometric sine function. The coriolis effect and the Foucault pendulum are both based on ...
 See also: Time, Rotation, Earth, Energy, Light
  
|
RSS
