A 33-metre Foucault Pendulum, which demonstrates how the earth revolves, has been installed in Torun, birthplace of astronomer Copernicus, the discoverer of the heliocentric universe.
The gleaming pendulum is the first major exhibit to be installed at the emerging Mill of Knowledge Modernity Centre.
The exhibit follows French physicist Leon Foucault, whose famed pendulum was a landmark device in demonstrating how the earth revolved. Foucault performed the first public demonstration in Paris in February 1851.
Several centuries earlier, Torun-born astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus who discovered, much to the Church’s discomfort, that the Earth revolves around the sun and not the other way round, as had previously been thought.
Copernicus (known as Mikolaj Kopernik in Poland), who studied at Krakow’s Jagiellonian University, published his pioneering book On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres in 1543, describing how the earth revolved around the sun.

Source: PAP, Polskie Radio