You may have been pleased to see a new Google Doodle today. If you’ve not already seen it, just cast your eyes downwards:

This is in honour of Léon Foulcault. A French physicist who first demonstrated the Earth’s rotation with his creation of the Foulcault Pendulum.

The way this worked was to set a pendulum up and place dominos or something similar around the edge of the pendulum’s swing. You then proceed to swing the pendulum.

Given that we now know for sure the earth is rotating, this device proved to show that with no external force, the pendulum that would supposedly swing backwards and forwards, eventually had it’s swing distorted into an oblong by the natural rotation of the Earth.

Blog Post by: Greg McVey