Wednesday, September 18, 2013

Foucault Pendulum @ Pantheon Paris

I should have blogged about this when we visited the Pantheon in Paris. It was a quiet late afternoon when we arrived b4 the silence were broke up a stream of protestors on the street. Oh well in Europe it is soooooo sooooo sooooooo common to have procession and protestors every weekend. From anti eurozone to save palestine to unemployment and oh watever.

Now that I've recalled about Pantheon, I can't find the pics anymore...*blame it on JS*. He can't remember which memory card it was stored in. Too many cameras, can't remember we took it with which and there's a gazillion of memory cards in his camera room. He doesn't have the time to load one by one to check when each card consisted of thousands of pics in raw format. I don't understand why he needs to snap in such hi-res with 20mb each pic. Mr. JS we are not snapping pic for a billboard print material ok?


Anyway the Foucault pendulum was invented by Leon Foucault and today is his 194th Birthday. :)))) I've learnt it in school about his pendulum and was so infatuated by it....oh how I can be woo-ed by a pendulum then :P

the Foucault pendulum at Pantheon Paris

installed in 1851, with a 67 metres long cable and a 28kg brass bob suspended from its dome. Today the bob is on display at the museum. In 2010 the cable snapped and poor bob dropped onto the marble flooring and damaged the original marble flooring :(((

Monkey was so mesmerised by the swinging bob and spent a few freaking hours staring at this apparatus swinging clockwise. While on the South Pole this bob swings anti clockwise.

If u would like to find out more about the Foucault Pendulum *click here*
but not everyone is a geekie geek like me....so do go to google's main page to play with the apparatus :))))

Aside from the pendulum, there's a must visit crypt down the Pantheon. Marie Curie the first lady who won a Nobel Prize was buried here. She's such a great physicist, I admired her deeply.....so was Louise Braille who invented "braille" and Victor Hugo!!!!! think Les Miserables, think Hunchback of Notre Dame and all of his other great works.

Really, it was such a treat to visit the Pantheon. It's almost like a museum to me. Especially paying tributes to all the notable people down at the tomb.....hahahahahaha. JS was shaking his head at Monkey as she bowed and whispered to each and every of the tomb that she recognised. After so many months, I kinda forgotten wat I've whispered but it must be how much I've enjoyed reading their works when I was back in school :)))))

2 comments:

js said...

The pendulum formulae T=2xpiex(L/G)to the power of 1/2 or simply square root. T= the period of one cycle of swing.
L = the length of the pendulum string or in this case the height of the dome and G= the acceleration of the gravity pull which equals to 9.81 m/s/s.
with this formula you can actually calculate the height of the dome :)))

CHER-RY said...

JS Lim!!!! U are as Geeky as ME.
*heart heart heart*
:)))))))))))))))))