At the Houston Museum of Natural Science they recently made a disturbing discovery: their Foucault pendulum had stopped swinging for the first time since its installation in the 1970s. (Video, embedded below.)
While some might take this as yet another sign of the end times, here it is simply a sign that the electromagnetic system that kicks the pendulum developed a fault and will need to be fixed.
Their explainer video of this Herzstein Foucault pendulum is also worth watching, as it explains both the underlying physics and this particular pendulum’s construction. Every 48 hours the 81.6 kg heavy pendulum completes a full rotation, like clockwork, with pins along the circumference being tipped over one by one as the pendulum precesses.
Invented by [Léon Foucault] in 1851 as an experimental demonstration of Earth’s rotation using a swinging pendulum, the Foucault pendulum remains a popular physical demonstration in museums and elsewhere. Although the pendulum seems to just follow the same line, it gradually shifts its plane of oscillation, making it seem that it rotates around its attachment point.
The effect differs per region of the Earth globe, making it both a fascinating experiment and a sore point for those who insist that the Earth is a flat, unmoving disc.
Not only does it measure the rotation of the Earth, but also its shape due to how the effect changes depending on the pendulum’s position on the globe, with the north and south poles showing it will precess in exactly 24 hours, while at the equator the pendulum will not precess at all.
We hope that the repair of the mechanism behind the Houston museum’s pendulum progresses smoothly, and would love to see a video of its innards and repair.
Apparently the fix is to fix the electromagnetic system.
MMM… Yes, it’s another proof of spherical earth… In a rotating disc, all pendulums would rotate the same amount per unit of time, while in a sphere it depends on the latitude.
No but, yeah but, no but, yeah but, it’s the WEF and Soros that make you believe this but you need to do your own research!
And so on.
I somethimes read the comments under a Facebook post about the ice wall, chemtrails or disproof of the moon landing, fascinating. I always wonder if these people are just trolling and I stepped into their jokes or that they are dead serious about it. Recently I spoke an old schoolmate that was convinced that the landings on the moon were faked. He also firmly believes in god so that’s how he rolls. But still…
Poe’s law ..
Another good reason to stay away from FaceBook………….
is anyone PascalCasing anything in 2025 though?
What about the identical twin secret society, the Monozygoti? Like the Illuminati, but with backup!
Someone once said that a fool who persists in their folly will become wise. If someone believes the earth is flat, and they set out to travel persistently and rigorously in one direction, they will become to understand that the earth is a cylinder.
Very true. I firmly believe in telling flat earth followers to go for a long walk in a straight line :-)
…and preferably away from me but for some strange reason they keep coming back…
Just tell them to head northeast, and keep going that way
.. and that Greenland is the biggest continent, and don’t let’s even get started on Antarctica
Yeah i would paraphrase this as if you genuinely care about something then you probably know the truth of it. The lies a person accepts show the things they don’t actually care about. The thing is, we’re inundated in stuff we don’t really care about. It’s a death of meaning. We’re often like the LLM, with ‘truth’ derived socially through language without an experiential reference.
The Earth is an oblate spheroid, not a cylinder.
woosh
It’s futile to try to prove it, there’s always a cope they will cook up to explain it away. Luckily the type of person who truly believes this is orders of magnitude rarer than people seem to think, since most are basically engagement baiting or cultivating an edgy personal brand.
I mean… if it only moves because there is a machine that makes it move… and it stopped moving because the machine broke… pretty much flat earth then.
/s
Gosh, all those flat Earthers must be having a real cow after watching this.
Hmm. At 2:20 they’ve got the graphic rotating the wrong direction. Way to go, Science Educators!
Hey, maybe they recorded it with the frontal camera of the phone! 🤔 🤪
Sorry to harp on and on, “…a sign that the electromagnetic system that kicks the pendulum developed a fault and will need to be fixed…” meant that the system was probably (my speculation) put together by a lowest-paid contractor (maybe even a high school graduate) who didn’t know any better, but proved to be so reliable, that nobody bothered to check or maintain it, because there are Things That Are More Important Than That (like renaming entire foundation and all of its buildings to honor some kind of contemporary politician, which means all kinds of unplanned grant moneys suddenly come rushing in).
IMHO, I bet it runs off a C battery that simply run out of juice, and since the battery holder is screwed to a wall in adjacent janitor’s closet, and all staff janitors were fired long time ago, replaced with random contractors who bring their own supplies, the mentioned closet hasn’t been opened since 2000. The keys were lost, and the door has long been covered by a bookshelf full of overpriced mostly useless manuals nobody reads, but were mandatory to buy at extraordinary prices, because the company printing and selling these was owned by a fruitless progeny of one of the donors, who needed to fake the profitability in order to get the progeny accepted to Hah-vahd, Pahlitikal Scaiance Major and proceed with the needed networking, ie, telescoping career of “elected politicians”.
Feel free to recycle the mentioned soap opera plots : – ] (and there are plenty more left where those came from)
… and on the door there was a sign saying ‘beware of the leopard’
The original design / install lasted about 50 years, I would say that’s a pretty good run and a tribute to the original designer and installers
Hitler lasted 56 years. That’s pretty good too, but I don’t think you’d want him running your local Walmart or Home Depot.
I’m pretty sure I’d rather he was running a Walmart or Home Depot than running a country … just saying.
Without Hitler there would be no V-2 and in the long term no Moon landing by NASA. So he did some bad things and some good things.
Wow. Poe’s Law and Godwin’s law in the same thread. I should have started a bingo card.
@ Baltar
Robert Goddard, an American, was the significant early developer of rocketry.
V-2 wasn’t possible without – 1 – Robert Goddard developing liquid propellant rocketry – 2 – US Government (and military) uninterested – 3 – von Braun learning from Robert Goddard – 4 – German military interested.
And a significant contributor to the German rocket program.
Rewind the spring.