Foucaults pendulum

Whats a pendulum?
Something hanging from a fxed point which, when pulled back and
released, is free to swing down by force of gravity and then out and up
because of its inertia.
Who was Foucault?
Jean Bernard Leon Foucault was born in 1819, the son of a French
publisher. He showed early skill in making mechanical toys, studied
medicine, but shifted to physical sciences at the Paris Observatory. He
became one of the most versatile experimentalists of all time.
The Foucault pendulum, or Foucault's pendulum, named after the
French physicist Lon Foucault, is a simple device conceived as an
experiment to demonstrate the rotation of the Earth. While it had long
been known that the Earth rotated, the introduction of the Foucault
pendulum in 1851 was the frst simple proof of the rotation in an easy-
to-see experiment. Today, Foucault pendulums are popular displays in
science museums and universities.
Foucaults frst demonstration was in his cellar. His second
demonstration was in Paris Observatory, using a wire almost 11 metres
long; the longer the wire, the longer and slower the oscillations.The frst
public exhibition of a Foucault pendulum took place in February 1851 in
the Meridian of the Paris Observatory. A few weeks later Foucault made
his most famous pendulum when he suspended a 28 kg brass-coated
lead bob with a 67 meter long wire from the dome of the Panthon, Paris.
The plane of the pendulum's swing rotated clockwise 11 per hour,
making a full circle in 32.7 hours. The original bob used in 1851 at the
Panthon was moved in 1855 to the Conservatoire des Arts et Mtiers in
Paris. A second temporary installation was made for the 50th
anniversary in 1902.
On April 6, 2010 the cable suspending the bob in the Muse des Arts et
Mtiers snapped, causing irreparable damage to the pendulum and to
the marble fooring of the museum.
Any pendulum consists of a cable or wire or string and a bob. For a
pendulum to easily demonstrate the Foucault efect, it should have as
long a cable as possible (12-30 meters) and a heavy symmetrical bob
(this one is hollow brass, weighing about 110 kg). All pendulums lose a
bit of energy with each swing due to friction from air currents and
vibrations in the cable and other factors. Thus, left to itself the
pendulum would swing in shorter and shorter arcs until after a few
hours it will decrease almost to zero. To keep the Foucault Pendulum
going, one must replace the energy lost with each swing. This can be
done by giving the pendulum a little "kick" with each swing.
To do this, two iron collars are attached to the cable near the top. There
is a doughnut-shaped electromagnet built into the ceiling, and the iron
collar swings back and forth inside the hole of the doughnut. When the
pendulum cable reaches a particular point in its swing, it is detected by
an electronic device and the magnet is turned on at just the right time to
give the collar (and thus the cable and the bob) a little "kick" in the exact
direction of its natural swing. This restores the energy lost during the
swing and keeps the pendulum from stopping. It has no efect on the
direction of the swing, and thus does not interfere with the
demonstration that the earth is rotating.
If you start a Foucault Pendulum swinging in one direction, after a few
hours you will notice that it is swinging in a quite diferent direction.
How does this happen?
Lets consider what are the forces acting on the pendulum?
1.Its the pendulum INERTIA that makes it swing straight out and
the force of GRAVITY that pulls it straight back (or rather down
its the force of the wire that makes it go in an arc rather than
straight down)
2.And AIR RESISTANCE makes it swing in shorter arcs but just as
straight arcs (in the demonstration, the electromagnet booster
merely counteracts this air resistance)
3.Also minor disturbances such as AIR CURRENTS may throw its
path an inch or two of center
4.However, since it is tied to the building, the pendulum will travel
literally as the building moves literally but because of the way it
is suspended it will not twist around if the building twists around.
So, if the pendulum seems to rotate with respect to the foor and we
know there are no forces available to make the pendulum rotate, then it
must be the foor that is rotating and if the foor is attached to the earth,
then it must be the earth rotating !
Imagine you are in a museum located at the north pole and that the
museum has a Foucault Pendulum suspended from the ceiling at a point
exactly over the pole. When you set the pendulum swinging it will
continue to swing in the same direction unless it is pushed or pulled in
some other direction. (This is due to a basic law of nature called Newton's
First Law.) The earth, on the other hand, will rotate once every 24 hours
underneath the pendulum. Thus if you stood watching the pendulum,
after a quarter of an hour or so, you would be likely to notice that the
line of the pendulum's swing has changed to a diferent direction. This
would be especially clear if one marked the position of the line of swing
in the morning and had the pendulum knocking down pegs arranged in
a ring at the center. At the north pole the apparent rotation would be a
full circle of 360 degrees each 24-hour day, or about 15 degrees per hour.
This case is fairly simple, because here the earth and the pendulum are
not exerting much infuence on each other. As you move of the north
pole down to a more southerly point like Washington, for example, the
earth not only rotates under the pendulum, but it carries Washington,
the building, and the pendulum, in a great circle about its axis. That is,
the motion of the earth is now mixed in a complicated way with the
motion of the pendulum. As you can prove if you watch the pendulum for
a while, the efect of this is to slow down the apparent rotation of the
swing. Instead of seeming to rotate 15 degrees (about 1/24 of a full circle)
in one hour, it only changes by about 9 degrees (about 1/40 of a full
circle). The further south you go, the slower the apparent rotation gets,
and at the equator there is no rotation at all. Below the equator the
apparent rotation begins again, but in the opposite direction.
The swing of Foucault's pendulum depends on the way we set it into the
motion. If we defect the pendulum by a maximal angle and then release
it without an initial speed, then the pendulum will swing as in the frst
animation. Speed of the pendulum in the extreme positions is equal to
zero. When we set the pendulum in motion by a short push at the
position of equilibrium it will swing as it is shown in the second
animation. Actually the speed of the pendulum in the extreme positions
is the speed of the earth rotation in the point of observation.
How the rotation of the Earth afects our lives
In plane fights Navigators must allow for deviation to right when fying
in northern hemisphere -- and to left in southern hemisphere.
Space fights The rotation of the earth creates special problems on
fights to and from the moon.
Winds created by high to low pressure have a right hand defection that
creates cyclones, hurricanes and typhoons, in the northen hemisphere
Most important the rotation of the earth results in wider distribution of
rain over the earth.
If no frequent spin, there would be a steady fow of cool air from pole to
equator. The cool air would be near the surface; as it warmed, the air
would gradually rise and fow back toward the the pole, dropping its
water content as it again cooled. This would tend to produce constant
rain near the equator and deserts in the northern and southern parts of
the world. The rotation of the earth helps break up this north-south
cycle by introducing an east (or west) defection.