New Delhi: To celebrate the 194th birth anniversary of French physicist Léon Foucault Google has posted an interactive digital version of his famous Foucault pendulum as a doodle on its home pages.
The Foucault pendulum was created by Léon Foucault to provide experimental evidence that the Earth rotates on its axis. A son of a publisher, his full name was Jean-Bernard-Léon Foucault. He was born on September 18, 1819 in Paris.
In the Foucault pendulum doodle with the help of controls on the right allows a users to replicate changes in the trajectory of the Earth's rotation over time and quite like the original Foucault pendulum, it knocks down pins at different positions as time elapses and the Earth rotates.
The letters in the Google logo are spelt out as inscribings on the pattern on the ground below the pendulum.
The Foucault pendulum was first demonstrated in 1851 when Foucault suspended a heavy iron ball from a wire and used the motion of the ball to prove that the Earth rotates on its axis. The pendulum demonstrated in the Google doodle is a copy of the Foucault's Pendulum in the Panthéon, Paris.
Léon Foucault also developed a method to measure the speed of of light. Though Foucault studied medicine he later switched his interests to experimental physics.
Léon Foucault died on February 11, 1868. He was 48.
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