Foucault, revisited: Scientists show how to

build a pendulum for any classroom

9 November 2010

Walk into nearly any science museum worth its salt
and you're likely to see a Foucault pendulum, a
simple but impressive device for observing the
Earth's rotation. Such pendulums have been
around for more than 150 years, and little about
how they work remains a mystery today.
The only problem, according to Argentinean
researcher Horacio Salva, is that the devices are
generally large and unwieldy, making them
impractical to install in places where space is at a
premium. This limitation was something he and his
colleagues at the Centro Atómico Bariloche in
Argentina wanted to address.
the Earth's rotation, which for generations has been
novel enough to astonish when first observed.
Here's the beginning of a February 23, 1908 article
in The New York Times describing a Foucault
pendulum display in the Big Apple: "Perhaps you
were one of the crowd of people who saw the great
Foucault pendulum experiment last week at
Columbia University. Probably you watched it like
the rest with openmouthed wonder."
The heavier the suspended orb and the longer the
wire, the more limited the elliptical drift. Similarly,
older children on taller swings tend to fly straighter
than younger children in the shorter toddler swings.

Now in the American Institute of Physics journal Consider the dimensions of an 80-year-old
Review of Scientific Instruments, Salva and Foucault pendulum on display at Philadelphia's
colleagues report success in what he Franklin Institute: a 180-pound-orb hangs from a
acknowledges was a fun side project -- building wire 85 feet long and swings back and forth once
two pendulums precisely enough to make every 10 seconds. The two pendulums built by
measurements of the spinning Earth yet compact Salva are kiddie-sized in comparison. In the case of
enough to fit in a lobby or classroom of just about the first, a 27-pound weight swings back and forth
any science building. on a 16-foot-long piano wire once every 4 and a
half seconds. The second pendulum uses the same
By definition, Foucault pendulums -- which are weight and an even shorter wire. Using a copper
named after the French physicist Léon Foucault ring underneath each orb to damp down the drift,
who first conceived of one in the middle of the 19th Salva was able to easily observe and measure
century -- count as a simple technology. Generally, precession, the technical name for the movement
a metal orb is suspended by a wire and hung from of the Earth relative to the fixed swinging of the
a height that can be dozens and dozens of feet. pendulums. Indeed his jiggering of the pendulums
The orb is pulled back and released, and as it was able to tune out all but one percent of the
swings back and forth over the course of a day, it elliptical "noise," at least in the case of his longer
appears to slowly rotate in a circle. In fact what's pendulum.
observed is the Earth moving underneath the
pendulum, which swings back and forth in a fixed Admittedly, says Salva, this new pendulum by no
plane, like a gyroscope. means has the precision necessary to make any
groundbreaking new measurements. But the
Or rather, it's more accurate to say that pendulums design, he says, is sophisticated enough to be a
swing in a mostly fixed plane. That's because, as useful tool for teaching basic physics concepts to
anyone who pushes a child in a swing can attest, physics students and the general public.
it's tough to keep a pendulum swinging in a straight
line. Over time, due to the vagaries of friction and "There's obviously no pressure to do work like this,"
other forces, a pendulum will start to travel in an said Salva, who in his day job studies far more
ellipse, an effect that can easily garble evidence of sophisticated "pendulums" involving the elasticity of

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 various materials. "It's mostly for fun, though I think
it may well help students in the future, too."

Pointing to one possible application, the paper

notes that the device was able to detect
earthquakes of medium intensity that took place as
far away as 765 km. "Some earthquakes can be
seen, because the seismic wave moves the support
of the pendulum increasing the ellipse of the
moment and changing the precession speed," said
Salva.

More information: The article, "A Foucault's

pendulum design" by Horacio R. Salva, Rubén E.
Benavides, Julio C. Perez, and Diego J. Cuscueta
appears in the journal Review of Scientific
Instruments. See:
rsi.aip.org/resource/1/rsinak/v81/i11/p115102_s1

Provided by American Institute of Physics

APA citation: Foucault, revisited: Scientists show how to build a pendulum for any classroom (2010,
November 9) retrieved 2 June 2021 from https://phys.org/news/2010-11-foucault-revisited-scientists-
pendulum-classroom.html

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