Jean bernard leon foucault pendulum
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Current and former faculty members of the Walla Walla University School of Engineering and the Southern Adventist University Department of Physics and Engineering collaborated to construct a Foucault pendulum that has been “working” since 1999. In 1851, French physicist Jean Bernard Leon Foucault discovered that a pendulum’s swing plane changes its orientation as a result of the Earth’s rotation, providing scientific proof for the earth’s daily rotation.
Located in the lobby of Southern’s science center, the pendulum has been able to swing continuously for over 8,500 days thanks to perfectly timed pulses of energy from an electromagnet that was designed by Carlton Cross, WWU professor emeritus of engineering. A switching circuit to switch the magnet off and on was built by Ralph Stirling, WWU professor of engineering and instrument engineer.
Cross explained that the challenge of the project centered on estimating how much energy would be needed for each swing of the pendulum. To understand this, Cross suggested imagining a person sitting on a swing being pulled back by a friend. When the swing becomes higher, the person in the swing has more potential energy, but has only kinetic energy at the bottom of the swing. When the person rises up again, potential energy
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Léon Foucault
Catholic Somebody of rendering Past
September 18, 1819 infer February 11, 1868
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__1851: __ Léon Foucault uses a pendulum to demonstrate the rotation of the Earth. It is the first direct visual evidence not based on watching the stars circle in the sky.
Jean Bernard Léon Foucault was born in 1819. His mother wanted him to become a doctor, but he dropped out of medical school when he made his first scientific discovery: He couldn’t stand the sight of blood.
Without formal scientific training, he worked as a lab assistant and continued tinkering. He used the new Daguerreotype photographic process to take the first photograph of the sun. Together with Armand Fizeau, in 1850 he devised a way to use rotating mirrors to measure the speed of light. They observed that light travels more slowly in water than in air.
Scientists had been trying for two centuries to drop objects from towers and measure their drift as the planet spun beneath them. It didn't work: too quick, too crude, too many interfering factors.
Foucault had an insight. A pendulum hanging on a wire and swinging directly north and south would appear to the observer to slowly move its plane of oscillation as the Earth turned underneath it.
To grasp this, just picture a pendulum at the North Pole. It starts at zero degrees longitude and swings back and