Foucault's pendulum installed in Copernicus home-town
PR dla Zagranicy
Nick Hodge
28.05.2013 13:08
A 33-metre Foucault Pendulum, which demonstrates how the earth revolves, has been installed in Torun, birthplace of astronomer Copernicus, the discoverer of the heliocentric universe.
Photo: PAP/Tytus Zmijewski
The gleaming pendulum is the first major exhibit to be installed at the emerging Mill of Knowledge Modernity Centre.
The exhibit follows French physicist Leon Foucault, whose famed pendulum was a landmark device in demonstrating how the earth revolved. Foucault performed the first public demonstration in Paris in February 1851.
Several centuries earlier, Torun-born astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus who discovered, much to the Church's discomfort, that the Earth revolves around the sun and not the other way round, as had previously been thought.
Copernicus (known as Mikolaj Kopernik in Poland), who studied at Krakow's Jagiellonian University, published his pioneering book On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres in 1543, describing how the earth revolved around the sun.
The new Foucault Pendulum was constructed by German firm Huettinger, and is the largest model of its kind in Poland.
The pendulum cost 255,000 zloty (61,000 euro), and the lion's share of the funding for the centre has come from the European Regional Development Fund, supplemented by the city of Torun. (nh/pg)
Source: PAP