Foucault's Best-Remembered Experiment: Rotation of Earth on its Axis - French Tribune

Léon Foucault assisted in developing a technique that will help to make the study of orbits easy. Two hundred years back, it was not easy for the scientists to represent the complex planetary orbits. The 194th birth anniversary of the French physicist's, Jean Bernard Léon Foucault, was celebrated on Wednesday. He was born in 1819 in Paris. He was a medical student. He was not having any interest in medical dissections. He was having a brilliant mind when he was asked to make models, tools, and devices. A machine was designed by Foucault, a series of teachers, bosses, and partners that could handle many scientific questions that were not easy to grasp. The speed of light was computed by Foucault. He could even find a technique to prove that light travels in form of wave and not as beam of particles. In 1851, he was able to prove that the earth rotates on its axis. To prove this he put a weight at the end of six-foot wire. This pendulum was held on a pile of damp sand, and as it moves back and forth it touched the sand. Even, a large-scale version of pendulum was ordered by the French government to be held in the Pantheon in Paris. It was 219-foot long and weighed nearly 61-pound. via Science - Google News http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&fd=R&usg=AFQjCNF3y4_qLewNxVsLvD0rA0iBxnUK3A&url=http://frenchtribune.com/teneur/1319927-foucault-s-best-remembered-experiment-rotation-earth-its-axis

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