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Posts tagged massachusetts

Nate:
Originally published as "The Stories of Scientists," by Nate Barksdale, Comment, Fall 2010, reprinted (with illustrations!) here

Foucault’s pendulum has fallen. On April 6, the steel cable snapped and sent it crashing onto the polished floor of the Musée des Artes et Metiers in Paris. The 28 kilogram brass weight ended its 159-year career—the dented bob is, a museum spokesperson affirmed, beyond repair—doing what it was meant to do: obeying the law of gravity. I have to admit I shed a tear (or at least the idea of a tear) for the fallen bit of scientific history, not because I’d visited the pendulum myself, or even read the 1988 Umberto Eco novel which takes its title and climax from the now-not-swinging orb. I have my own tangled history with pendulums—one stretching back, depending how you count it, decades, even centuries. It’s quite a bit of weight to bear, but a tale worth telling.

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"Highland Light" (North Truro, Massachusetts), watercolor over graphite on rough white wove paper, 1930, by Edward Hopper, Harvard Art Museum :: via "Edward Hopper's Cape Cod: Then and Now," NYTimes.com, 10 August 2009
Nate: