Dartmouth University
grrlscientist | June 15, 2010tags: Foucault's Pendulum, physics, rotation, Pendulum, Jim LaBelle, Dartmouth University, wow, streaming video
This video features physics and astronomy professor Jim LaBelle, as he discusses the truly fascinating science behind a classic physics experiment, Foucault's pendulum, while seated next to Dartmouth University's pendulum in Fairchild Tower.
While scientists already knew that the Earth had a rotation, they had struggled to come up with a way of definitively proving this was so. In 1851, French scientist Leon Foucault gave a sensational demonstration in the Paris Pantheon proving…
ddobbs | February 5, 2009
A coral atoll, from Darwin's The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs, 1842.
For those teeming millions near Hanover, N.H., here's notice that I'll be giving a talk at Dartmouth at 4pm today -- Thu, Feb 5 -- about Darwin's first, favorite, and (to me) most interesting theory, which was his theory about how coral reefs formed.
This is the subject of my book Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral, and I'll be posting more about it next week, during the Blog for Darwin festival. But the short version -- and the topic of my talk -- is this:
Darwin's coral…