If there were ever any truth in the esoteric tales of Umberto Eco’s bestselling novel Foucault’s Pendulum, it seems that the key to that knowledge has been lost. The original pendulum, which was used by French scientist Leon Foucault to demonstrate the rotation of the Earth and which forms an integral part of Eco’s labyrinthine plot, has been irreparably damaged in an accident in Paris. The pendulum’s cable snapped in April and its sphere crashed to the marble floor of the Musee des Arts et Metiers.
In 1851, Foucault used the pendulum to perform a sensational demonstration in the Paris Pantheon, proving to Napoleon III and the Parisian elite that the earth revolved around its own axis. Such was its success that the experiment was replicated throughout Europe.
According to Thierry Lalande, the museum’s ancient scientific instruments curator, the pendulum’s brass bob has been badly damaged in three places and cannot be restored. “It’s not a loss, because the pendulum is still there, but it’s a failure because we were unable to protect it,” he laments.
The circumstances surrounding the accident have raised eyebrows in France. The museum regularly hosts cocktail parties in the chapel that houses the pendulum, and Lalande admits that several alarming incidents had occurred over the past year. In May 2009, for example, a partygoer grabbed the 28 kg instrument and swung it into a security barrier.
Amir D. Aczel, research fellow in the history of science at Boston University, describes the news of the accident as saddening. “It is certainly one of the most important historical instruments of all time. It’s a bit like hearing that one of the statues at the Vatican has been broken,” says Aczel.
Foucault’s experiment involved releasing a pendulum and watching the earth rotate under its oscillation frame. Dr. Aczel says that it brought “closure for Galileo” and led the church to accept the rotation of the Earth. William Tobin, a retired astronomy lecturer and biographer of Foucault, describes the accident as embarrassing for the museum, and a blow for French academia. Dr. Tobin helped to identify the pendulum used by Foucault from among the other similar instruments held in the museum, and said that examining old instruments in the flesh “tells you more about the development of science than the written record can”.
However, Thibault Damour, professor of theoretical physics at the Paris Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques, says scholars can find comfort in the fact that the legacy of Foucault’s experiment, which asked “fundamental questions about the nature of space and time”, lived on in “Einstein’s thought and in current experiments”.
(Excerpted and adapted from Times Higher Education)