Kater's pendulum minutes per day slower than at Paris, or equivalently the length of a pendulum with a swing of one second there was 1¼ Paris "lines", or 2.6 mm, shorter than at Paris. It was realized by the scientists of the day, and proven by Isaac Newton in 1687, that this was due to the fact that the Earth was not a perfect sphere but slightly oblate; it was thicker at the equator because of the Earth's rotation. Since the surface was farther from the Earth's center at Cayenne than at Paris, gravity was weaker there. Since that time pendulums began
Foucault's Pendulum Foucault's Pendulum Foucault's Pendulum (original title: "Il pendolo di Foucault" ) is a novel by Italian writer and philosopher Umberto Eco. It was first published in 1988, and an English translation by William Weaver appeared a year later. "Foucault's Pendulum" is divided into ten segments represented by the ten Sefiroth. The satirical novel is full of esoteric references to Kabbalah, alchemy, and conspiracy theory—so many that critic and novelist Anthony Burgess suggested that it needed an index. The pendulum of the title refers to an actual pendulum designed by French physicist Léon Foucault to demonstrate Earth's rotation, which has symbolic