Foucaultsches Pendel in der Pfarrkirche Pöllau

and yet it moves!Since time immemorial, our species has searched for the why and how of our existence on Earth. Mentally, the Earth, and thus we humans, were usually at the center. Yes, and the world outside (sun, moon, stars) revolved around us, seemingly timelessly eternal.In awareness of our mortality and the longing for eternal life, hundreds of creation stories emerged to understand and explain this mystery.Only for about 400 years has the understanding of natural scientific laws solidified to explain the connections in the cosmos. The validity of these laws was and is checked through experiments.Until the 17th century, there was a fixed idea of a geocentric worldview, at least in Europe (Earth and humans are the center of the universe).In the 17th century, through physical observations of the sky by Giordano Bruno, Galileo Galilei, Nikolai Copernicus, Johannes Kepler ... the worldview changed radically from a scientific perspective. The new insights into the laws of celestial mechanics prevailed. The Church, however, clung to the old for a long time instead of recognizing that nature with its laws - from the perspective of faith - is part of God's plan of creation, and it is the task of science to describe these laws.Result:The Earth and thus we humans are not the center of the universe.It is not the sun and the stars that revolve around the Earth, but the Earth rotates on its own axis and orbits the sun once a year at the edge of our inconspicuous galaxy, the Milky Way.In 1851, Leon Foucault demonstrated the Earth's rotation to a wide public with his spectacular pendulum experiment in the Paris Pantheon. The pendulum always swings back and forth in the same direction if it is not influenced by external forces. On the rosette on the floor, one can see that the Earth continues to rotate "under the pendulum!".Furthermore, to the faithful person, the pendulum, in its deliberate, always seemingly uniform movement, can tell something of the mystery of creation.Foucault's Pendulum shows the rotation of the EarthIn 1851, Léon Foucault conducted a spectacular experiment in the Pantheon in Paris: a 28 kg brass sphere was suspended from a 67 m long steel cable and set into oscillation.After some time, it was observed that the oscillation plane of the pendulum had seemingly changed. In reality, however, the Earth had continued to rotate under the pendulum. This was one of the first experiments that provided direct proof of the Earth's rotation.You can marvel at a scaled-down replica of this experiment here!Sammeltaxi Oststeiermark SAM (shared taxi), reservation at +43 50 36 37 38 or at Oststeiermark.at/SAM/