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MIT Lincoln Laboratory's installation of a pendulum re-creates Foucault's 1851 seminal demonstration of Earth's rotation. Foucault's pendulum, a 62-pound ball suspended from a dome on a 220-foot wire, swung over a ring of sand on the floor. A stylus attached to the ball traced a series of lines in the sand, each slightly clockwise to the previous one. Because a pendulum does not change its plane of motion, the explanation for this drawing must be that the floor was moving - that is, Earth was rotating about its axis. [Source: MIT News]
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