3 ms·
Sure, but this is just the Science Writing Uncertainty Principle: You can be brief, or you can be precise, but rarely can you be both brief and precise. Langew
by mechanical_fish 16y ago
Sure, but this is just the Science Writing Uncertainty Principle: You can be brief, or you can be precise, but rarely can you be both brief and precise.
Langewiesche doesn't have time for a discourse on the physics of the pendulum -- which is basically just another kind of gyro. He has just a couple of sentences for his aside, and his readers are not physicists, so he grabs for the example of the Foucault pendulum, because that's a pendulum experiencing gyroscopic forces that every science museum visitor has seen.
- ggchappell 16y agoAh, but the statement "the plane of its swing remained constant" is not imprecise; it is false. And I don't mean false-but-kinda-true like "pi = 3.14" is false-but-kinda-true; I mean just plain wrong. The fixed-plane idea seems to be a common misunderstanding, even among intelligent people, but it ain't so. The plane turns, even with respect to a "fixed" frame of reference that does not rotate with the Earth. I would have been better just to say that the plane changes, showing that the Earth rotates, and leave the explanations for another time.