Monday: June 7
The Pantheon & Foucault Pendulum
The Pantheon is bigger than it's Greek cousin. Its architecture and artwork alone make the visit an almost must. Contained within the Pantheon are the tombs of many famous ex-French including Marie Curie and Victor Hugo. You can also gain an excellent view over Paris from the colonnade around the building's dome. Although the Pantheon is not as old as the Pantheon in Rome, it does boast an interesting history and besides...its bigger!
The Foucault pendulum is named after the French physicist Léon
Foucault. It was conceived as an experiment to demonstrate the rotation of the
Earth. As seen earlier, Mssr. Foucault is buried in Pere Lachaise cemetery.
The Panthéon
The Panthéon (Latin: Pantheon, from Greek Pantheon, meaning "Every god") is a
building in the Latin Quarter in Paris, containing the remains of distinguished
French citizens.
In 1744, King Louis XV of France suffered from a serious illness and vowed to
replace the old church of the Abbey of St Genevieve if he recovered. He did
recover, and entrusted Abel-François Poisson, marquis de Marigny with the
fulfillment of his vow. In 1755, Marigny commissioned Jacques-Germain Soufflot
to design the church, with construction beginning two years later. Due to the
economic problems in France at this time, work proceeded slowly. In 1780,
Soufflot died and was replaced by his student, Jean-Baptiste Rondelet. The
remodeled Abbey of St. Genevieve was finally completed in 1790, but during the
early stages of the French Revolution, the National Constituent Assembly decided
to convert it into a secular mausoleum for prominent Frenchmen, retaining
Quatremère de Quincy to oversee the project.
It is an early example of neoclassicism, with a façade modeled on the Pantheon
in Rome, surmounted by a dome that owes some of its character to Bramante's "Tempietto".
Located in the 5th arrondissement on the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève, the Panthéon
looks out over all of Paris. Soufflot had the intention of combining the
lightness and brightness of the gothic cathedral with classical principles, but
its role as a mausoleum required the great gothic windows to be blocked.
Nevertheless, it is one of the most important architectural achievements of its
time and the first great neoclassical monument.
In 2006, Ernesto Neto, a Brazilian artist, installed "Léviathan Thot", an
anthropomorphic installation inspired by the biblical monster. The art
installation was in the Panthéon from September 15, 2006, until October 31 for
Paris' Autumn Festival.
In late 2006, a "cultural guerilla movement" calling itself Untergunther
completed a year-long project where they covertly repaired the Panthéon's
antique clockworks.
The inscription above the entrance reads AUX GRANDS HOMMES LA PATRIE
RECONNAISSANTE . The absence of a verb in French emphasizes that the implicit
notion of honour is given from the homeland to the great men. By burying its
great men in the Panthéon, the Nation wants to acknowledge the honour it
received from them. As such, interment here is severely restricted and is
allowed only by a parliamentary act for "National Heroes". Similar high honours
exist in Les Invalides for historical military leaders such as Napoléon, Turenne
and Vauban.
Among those buried in its necropolis are Voltaire, Rousseau, Victor Hugo, Émile
Zola, Jean Moulin, Marie Skłodowska-Curie, Louis Braille, Jean Jaurès and
Soufflot, the architects of the Panthenon.
The widely-repeated story that the remains of Voltaire were stolen by religious
fanatics in 1814 and thrown into a garbage heap is false. Such rumours resulted
in the coffin being opened in 1897, which confirmed that his remains were still
present.
On 30 November 2002, in an elaborate but solemn procession, six Republican
Guards carried the coffin of Alexandre Dumas (1802–1870), the author of The
Three Musketeers, to the Panthéon. Draped in a blue-velvet cloth inscribed with
the Musketeers' motto: "Un pour tous, tous pour un" ("One for all, all for
one,") the remains had been transported from their original interment site in
the Cimetière de Villers-Cotterêts in Aisne, France. In his speech, President
Jacques Chirac stated that an injustice was being corrected with the proper
honoring of one of France's greatest authors.
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Foucault pendulum
The Foucault pendulum (pronounced /fuːˈkoʊ/ "foo-KOH"), or Foucault's pendulum,
named after the French physicist Léon Foucault, was conceived as an experiment
to demonstrate the rotation of the Earth. As seen earlier, Mssr. Foucault is
buried in Pere Lachaise cemetery.
The experimental apparatus consists of a tall pendulum free to oscillate in any
vertical plane. The direction along which the pendulum swings rotates with time
because of Earth's daily rotation. This is because the plane of the pendulum's
swing, like a gyroscope, tends to keep a fixed direction in space, while the
Earth rotates under it. The first public exhibition of a Foucault pendulum took
place in February 1851 in the Meridian Room of the Paris Observatory. A few
weeks later, Foucault made his most famous pendulum when he suspended a 28 kg
bob with a 67 metre wire from the dome of the Panthéon, Paris. The plane of the
pendulum's swing rotated clockwise 11° per hour, making a full circle in 32.7
hours.
In 1851 it was well known that Earth rotated: in addition to the passage of the
sun and stars overhead, scientific evidence included Earth's measured polar
flattening and equatorial bulge. However, Foucault's pendulum was the first
simple proof of the rotation in an easy-to-see experiment, and it created a
sensation in the academic world and society at large..
At either the North Pole or South Pole, the plane of oscillation of a pendulum
remains fixed with respect to the fixed stars while Earth rotates underneath it,
taking one sidereal day to complete a rotation. So relative to Earth, the plane
of oscillation of a pendulum at the North or South Pole undergoes a full
clockwise or counterclockwise rotation during one day, respectively. When a
Foucault pendulum is suspended on the equator, the plane of oscillation remains
fixed relative to Earth. At other latitudes, the plane of oscillation precesses
relative to Earth, but slower than at the pole; the angular speed, α (measured
in clockwise degrees per sidereal day), is proportional to the sine of the
latitude, φ:
In order to demonstrate the rotation of the Earth without the philosophical
complication of the latitudinal dependence, Foucault used a gyroscope in an 1852
experiment. The gyroscope's spinning rotor tracks the stars directly. Its axis
of rotation is observed to return to its original orientation with respect to
the earth after one day whatever the latitude, not subject to the unbalanced
Coriolis forces acting on the pendulum as a result of its geometric asymmetry.
A Foucault pendulum requires care to set up because imprecise construction can
cause additional veering which masks the terrestrial effect. The initial launch
of the pendulum is critical; the traditional way to do this is to use a flame to
burn through a thread which temporarily holds the bob in its starting position,
thus avoiding unwanted sideways motion. Air resistance damps the oscillation, so
Foucault pendulums in museums often incorporate an electromagnetic or other
drive to keep the bob swinging; others are restarted regularly. In the latter
case, a launching ceremony may be performed as an added show.
There are numerous Foucault pendulums around the world, mainly at universities,
science museums and planetaria. A particularly famous and prominent one is
located at the United Nations in Manhattan.
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