New Delhi: Celebrating the 194th birthday of the French physicist Jean Bernard Léon Foucault, who is known for creating the Foucault pendulum, Google posted a doodle featuring an interactive digital version of the Foucault pendulum. But what is the Foucault pendulum, why was it created and what is its relevance?
The Foucault pendulum was named after Léon Foucault. It is a device which was created to demonstrate the rotation of the Earth. While it had long been known for a long time that the Earth rotated, the Foucault pendulum in 1851 was the first device which proved the rotation in an easy-to-see experiment. Foucault pendulums are today seen in science museums and universities.
The Foucault pendulum was exhibited to public for the first time in February 1851 in the Meridian of the Paris Observatory. Foucault suspended a heavy iron ball from a wire and used the motion of the ball to prove that the Earth rotates on its axis. The original bob which was used in 1851 at the Panthéon was moved in 1855 to the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers in Paris. The pendulum demonstrated in the Google doodle is a copy of the Foucault's Pendulum in the Panthéon, Paris.
An exact copy of the original Foucault pendulum has been swinging since 1995 under the dome of the Panthéon, Paris.
The doodle posted today has the Foucault pendulum which lets users, with the help of controls on the right, to replicate changes in the trajectory of the Earth's rotation over time. Quite like the original Foucault pendulum, it knocks down pins at different positions as time elapses and the Earth rotates.
Léon Foucault also developed a method to measure the speed of of light. Though Foucault studied medicine he later switched his interests to experimental physics. Léon Foucault died on February 11, 1868. He was 48.
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