I often have lunch with other museum guest researchers here at the Deutsches Museum. We usually wander across the river to the well-stocked cafeteria of the European Patent Office. The air conditioning is a bonus, and you can sit by a street-side window and watch Munich happening outside.
Recently, I had lunch with Ivo, an historian of mathematics, who told me that when he was 12, he visited the Deutsches Museum and couldn’t believe how slowly the Foucault Pendulum moved. So he did what any normal American boy might do (but which Germans would never dream of doing) - he climbed under the rope barrier to experiment with the swing of the pendulum. Problem was, he ended up breaking thingie with the little flip markers that record the movement of the Earth, which you can see in the third picture below.
Evidently he got into more than a little trouble and was hauled off to meet with the director himself. Now, more than 50 years later and retired, he still comes to the museum regularly to do historical research on mathematicians. My curiously whetted, I went right into the museum after lunch to check out the Foucault Pendulum exhibit for myself.Ivo was definitely right, because I could also hardly believe how long its period (swing) was. So I timed 5 swings with my watch (which took almost a minute and a half). I did the math and came up with 60.01 m for the length of the pendulum. Sir Isaac would have been proud; when I checked the exhibit label, it reported the pendulum as 60 m long…
On a difference topic... there is much history nearby. The famous Hofbrauhaus is not far away, and across the street is the Munich Hard Rock Cafe. While every Hard Rock is decorated with dozens of objects of Rock and Roll history, I'm not sure how many can sport this guitar, which is made of a chunk of steel-reinforced concrete from the Berlin Wall.
No comments:
Post a Comment