Foucault's pendulum is sent crashing to Earth

Historic instrument is irreparably damaged in an accident at a Paris museum.
Clea Caulcutt reports

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 novel's labyrinthine plot, has been irreparably damaged in an accident in Paris.

The pendulum's cable snapped last month 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 axis. Such was its success that the experiment was replicated throughout Europe.

Thierry Lalande, the museum's ancient scientific instruments curator, said that the pendulum's brass bob had been badly damaged in three places and could not 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 said. The circumstances surrounding the accident have raised eyebrows in France.

The museum regularly hosts cocktail parties in the chapel that houses the pendulum, and Mr Lalande admitted that several alarming incidents had occurred over the past year. In May 2009, for example, a partygoer grabbed the 28kg instrument and swung it into a security barrier.

Amir D. Aczel, research Fellow in the history of science at Boston University, described 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," he said.

Foucault's experiment involved releasing a pendulum and watching the Earth rotate under its oscillation frame. Dr Aczel said 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, said that the accident was embarrassing for the museum, and a blow for 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, said scholars would 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".

In particular, he pointed to a recent Nasa mission, Gravity Probe B, which verified Einstein's theory of relativity, which explains why the oscillation plane of the pendulum does not remain fixed in absolute space, as expected by Foucault, but is slowly dragged by the presence of the rotating Earth.

Extraído do Times Higher Education

Mike Bloomberg, poeta?

O bilionário Mike Bloomberg está se aventurando para o mundo da poesia. Para homenagear o Poem in Your Pocket Day e o The Envelope Project, o prefeito Bloomberg se arriscou em versos inspirados na primeira linha do "'Hope' is the thing with feathers" de Emily Dickinson.

Deu nisso aí embaixo:

"Hope" NYC

By Mike Bloomberg

"Hope" is the thing with feathers
That makes our City soar
It will take us to the future
As it's carried us before

Hope is the thing with feathers
That travels all our streets
It sings in every language
It sometimes even tweets

And though we may not see it
It perches everywhere
In new shops and small businesses
In every schoolroom chair

It could be our famous pigeon
Or fabled red-tailed hawk
Hope is the thing with feathers
That flies throughout New YAWK


Poesia ou não?

Curiosity, wonder and finding a narrative thread

The Sunday afternoon panel of nonfiction writers Pico Iyer, David Grann, Melissa Milgrom and Stephen Elliott promised to reveal how these writers uncover their stories, how they go about creating narrative from collected details. Well, that’s what the panel was supposed to be about -- but halfway through the allotted hour, a unified discussion hadn’t yet emerged.

Each author read five minutes from their most recent project, books about the Dalai Lama (Iyer), real-life Sherlock Holmes characters (Grann), taxidermy (Milgrom) and taking Adderral (Elliott).

The works have many and deep differences, in both subject matter and methodology. Perhaps they started at the same point, with a question. "Curiosity plus enthusiasm equals wonder," Iyer said. The question, “Who is the best giant squid hunter?” sent Grann to New Zealand for an article for the New Yorker. “Curiosity is the driving factor,” he said. And curiosity leads to unexpected discoveries and unlikely characters, like the stereotype-busting gentle, nature-loving taxidermists that became the subject of Milgrom’s book.

Starting points aside, what about narrative? Within a single story, Elliott said, “you have all these details and you start writing away from them, see where they take you. I never know what I’m writing until I’m 80% done with it."

I felt his pain -- 45 minutes into the panel, I still couldn’t find a central tenet, a nugget to take away from these tales of squid hunters and taxidermists. I didn’t yet have a story.

But then an audience member asked a broad, unanswerable question: In this new media landscape of twitter and flash blog posts, what’s the future of journalism? The panelists collectively paused, until moderator Geoff Nicholson joked, “How much time you got?”

Finally David Grann jumped in. Yes, he acknowledged, the business of publishing and writing is changing, and yes, advertisers are advertising less and threatening the viability of publications like the New Yorker. Yet there's something else. “The hunger for stories and the magic of stories isn’t going to go away," he said. "People still want to be moved and you don’t get moved in a tweet and you don’t get moved in a blog post.”

And that, I suppose, is the story of a book festival (as written on a blog).

-- Megan Kimble


Retirado do LA Times - Books

Onde está o coelho?

O novo livro infantil da Cosac Naify entra na edição da Revista Plaboy. O Segredo do Coelho, livro infantojuvenil do inglês John A. Rowe foi  dica do mês da seção "Happy Hour" da revista sob a chamada "O Futuro da Nação".

A reportagem faz uma alusão ao livro no qual você deve encontrar os coelhos escondidos em cada uma das páginas.

Propaganda de mal gosto ou treinamento para futuros compradores da revista? A editora Cosac Naify parece ter gostado:

"A alegria por aqui foi grande, afinal, raramente um livro infantil ganha destaque em uma publicação adulta."

Hábitos curiosos dos escritores

Extraído do site Lapham's Quarterly, esse gráfico mostra os mais curiosos e absurdos hábitos e métodos de alguns escritores. Quem sabe funciona?

Montaigne e sua relação com os livros

"A leitura me consola em minhas horas de recolhimento: ela me alivia do peso de uma ociosidade penosa e, a qualquer instante, é capaz de livrar-me de companhias maçantes. Ela entorpece dores que podem se tornar dilacerantes. Para me distanciar de pensamentos soturnos, simplesmente necessito recorrer aos livros."

Montaigne