After more than a decade, the Foucault Pendulum has returned to the Institute of Physics at Nicolaus Copernicus University, enabling visitors to observe the Earth’s rotation around its axis with their own eyes. The name of the pendulum commemorates its inventor, the French physicist Jean Bernard Léon Foucault, who first demonstrated it in February 1851 at the Paris Astronomical Observatory.

Foucault’s pendulum is located in the university’s Institute of Physics building. Exactly in the same place where the first pendulum was installed in 1998. It operated for just over 10 years and then disappeared for another decade.

The pendulum perfectly demonstrates the rotation of the Earth around its axis. If one hangs a large weight on a long rope and sets it in motion, then over time one notices that it changes the swinging plane as if something is shifting it. The easiest way to notice this is by spacing markers around the pendulum, which over time will fall over one by one.

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