Notes
07.05.2007
This is a Foucault Pendulum that swings in the basement of Fukusai-ji temple in Nagasaki. Apparently the third longest in the world, the cord runs from the gold ball pictured here, up 25m to the temple roof.
Foucault was a French physicist who demonstrated the revolutions of the earth using a pendulum just like this at the Paris Parthenon Cathedral in 1851. Due to the movement of the earth, the swing of the pendulum changes such that every three minutes the ball knocks over one of the small pins lined up below. In Nagasaki it takes 44 hours to knock all the pins over. In Tokyo, 41 hours, and at the North and South Poles, 24 hours.
I'm not sure what is more incredible, the phenomenon of this pendulum, or the fact that a seventy year old Japanese woman explained it all to me in her incredibly funny but lucid broken English.
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Image info
| Canon EOS 30D | |
| Focal Length: | 16 mm |
| Aperture: | f/6.3 |
| Exposure: | 1/2 sec |
| ISO Speed: | 200 |
Categories: Abstract, Colour, Traditional,
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