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Foucault's Pendulum & Traficant's Toupee

Friday, August 2, 2002

• TITLE: "Foucault's Pendulum and Traficant's Toupee"

  The Foucault Pendulum was invented by French physicist, Jean Bernard Foucault (pronounced foo-ko) in 1851 in Paris and was demonstrated for the first time at the world's fair in the Pantheon in Paris.

  What makes a Foucault pendulum different from a normal pendulum is that it is attached at the top to a universal joint which allows the pendulum to rotate freely around its fixing point as it swings.

  Sir Issac Newton's First Law of Motion states: "An object at rest tends to stay at rest and an object in motion tends to stay in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force." Once you set a Foucault Pendulum in motion, its direction of swing will rotate at a rate of about 0.2 degrees every minute.

  In fact, it isn't really the pendulum that's rotating: the pendulum is swinging back and forth in exactly the same direction. It's the Earth which is rotating underneath the pendulum, which makes it appear that the pendulum is in fact changing direction.

  At the North Pole, the pendulum appears to rotate through a whole 360 degrees once a day, because the Earth rotates all the way round underneath it. In the UK, because it is at a lower latitude, the rate of rotation is lower, at around 280 degrees per day. At the equator, a Foucault pendulum won't rotate at all. Below the equator the apparent rotation begins again, but in the opposite direction.

  As in all things scientific, it's really not as easy as all that. Joe Wolfe, from the University of New South Wales, points out that "Richard Feynman's Lectures on Physics gives a simple (?) argument to explain the period of precession, if one makes the assumption that the precession is uniform:"

  Consider a time at which the pendulum swings North-South. At the Northern end of the swing, the pendulum bob is further from the axis in the Southern hemisphere (this, remember, is written by a guy in Australia) by a distance Z.sin l, where Z is the amplitude of the swing, so the support point overtakes the pendulum bob with a relative horizontal speed ZW = 2pA.sin l/Tearth. Divide the circumference 2pA of the envelope of the pendulum's path relative to the earth by this speed and one has the period of precession Tearth/sin l.

  From: The Smithsonian Instititution, the California Academy of Sciences, the University of New South Wales, and the Millennium Mathematics Project

• So, what the devil does all that have to do with Traficant's Toupee? I don't know. The circular nature of things, I guess.

• " � Ren-and-Stempy �" From the Ren-n-Stimpy Frequently Asked Questions page:

  "The Ren & Stimpy Show" is one of four cartoon shows (collectively known as "The Nicktoons") produced by Nickelodeon, a Cable TV channel in North America. The two main characters are an "asthma-hound" chihuahua named "Ren H�ek" (with an umlaut over the o), and a cat named "Stimpson J. Cat". The show's attraction is its shameless and gross physical humor. It is suitable for the whole family, though some have called it an acquired taste.

  
  
  
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  Angry North Atlantic? Nope. The Potomac River
  behind Mullings Central during a storm yesterday.

  MullPhoto: Rich Galen ____________________________________________________________________________________