Casaubon And Coincidences

I am re-reading Umberto Eco's novel Foucault's Pendulum. As I was driving up to the hospital Thusday, I switched on KPCC, the local NPR station. (I had to get an x-ray to prove I don't have active tuberculosis: skin tests are useless on those of us who have already had TB.) A man with an accent was talking about how he had missed the chance to tell one of his former au pairs he loved her. He was talking about his new novel The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana. I was unfamiliar with the book.

It turns out that the man on the radio was Umberto Eco, and there I had one of his novels on the seat beside me. But it isn't just that that struck me. I don't usually watch the TV show Numbers, but I happened to bother just now. In it, one of the experiments conducted by the main character (a mathematician whose brother is an FBI agent) involved measuring a building's wind deflection by means of a pendulum. The theory behind such an experimentis similar to the idea behind Foucault's Pendulum (I have seen two manifestations of Foucault's Pendulum: in the Smithsonian and at Griffith Park). In the case on TV, the plumb drew an ellipse, theoretically (this was not explained in the show) using the difference between the position of the point of suspension and the corresponding point below the surface over which the plumb traced its path as the foci of the ellipse. I was disappointed by the writers' failure to include this as a pedagogical trick, but the 60-minute drama has its limits, I suppose, and not everything will strive to be Sesame Street for adults.

For those who have not experienced the wonder that is a Foucault's Pendulum, here's a quick summary. A pendulum is suspeneded from a fixed point, often, these days, with a motor that is below a joint, allowing the pendulum to maintain motion through a plane without being affected by the building. The pendulum is started and traces a path across the floor. This is nothing dramatic when observed for a brief period, but slowly (more quickly when the pendulum is near a pole than near the equator), its path changes, or, more correctly, appears to change. While it still passes the same center point beneath the point of suspension, the outer edges of its path seem to be rotating like those auto-timers you can put on your lamps when you are out of town.

Here's the cool part—something my father, an engineer by training, managed to transmit to my brother and me even in the late 1970s: the pendulum is not moving relative to the room; the room is moving relative to the pendulum. It's a sublime distinction, and even today a rather vertiginous concept. Here we are, observers of this creeping change as we stand stock still, and the pendulum moving before us is moving less than we are. Nothing is ever the same after witnessing something like that. It amazes me what so simple a device can do. A pendulum hangs from a point and swings through space—our space—and yet we, standing still, are the ones moving. And it is crazier still.

Put this against Newton's claim that every force meets an equal and opposite force, meaning that the Earth attracts us to it gravitationally with identical force than that with which we attract the Earth to us. This works because those two forces are one, of course. But what are we that we have the power to draw a planet to us, personally? That we, standing still, move at hundreds of miles per hour around the Earth's axis, thousands of miles per hour about the sun, millions of miles per hour through our arm of the galaxy? Standing on a point of light, indeed, Albert!