One of the wonderful things about science is that it often accomplishes things that you didn’t even think were possible in the service of doing things you would never think to do in the first place. A ...

William Tobin has written a biography of Léon Foucault, whom time and science forgot. The fact that Foucault has been overlooked is obvious from the book’s subtitle and the defensive preface. Clearly ...

Once in motion, the mass is free to move in any vertical direction. As the Earth's downward attraction vies with its daily rotation, the heavy pendulum – which, like a gyroscope (a word invented by ...

The first gyroscope was invented in 1852 by Leon Foucault (a traditional mechanical gyroscope of this general type is shown in Fig 1). Foucault thought that he could measure the rotation of the earth ...

Foucault's pendulum has fallen prey to gravity. The 60lb brass bob hanging from a 200ft wire was set to swing from the dome of the Pantheon in Paris by the French physicist Léon Foucault in 1851. It ...