EVERYDAY SCIENCE

Detailed explanation-1: -Wherever you put it, Foucault’s Pendulum swings from a motionless point while the earth rotates beneath it. Every point of the universe is a fixed point: all you have to do is hang the Pendulum from it.” Foucault’s pendulum is an easy experiment demonstrating the Earth’s rotation.

Detailed explanation-2: -It’s the Earth which is rotating underneath the pendulum, which makes it appear that the pendulum is in fact changing direction. At the North Pole, the pendulum would appear to rotate through a whole 360 degrees once a day, because the Earth rotates all the way round underneath it.

Detailed explanation-3: -A Foucault pendulum always rotates clockwise in the Northern Hemisphere with a rate that becomes slower as the pendulum’s location approaches the Equator. Foucault’s original pendulums at Paris rotated clockwise at a rate of more than 11° per hour, or with a period of about 32 hours per complete rotation.

Detailed explanation-4: -When you set the pendulum swinging it will continue to swing in the same direction unless it is pushed or pulled in some other direction. (This is due to a basic law of nature called Newton’s First Law.) The earth, on the other hand, will rotate once every 24 hours underneath the pendulum.

Detailed explanation-5: -You are going in the right direction: Since on a different latitude the pendulum will be rotating with earth, it will change the rotation due to the coriolis force.