Extra Credit

Last week our English 105 class took a trip around campus. As a class we visited P211.T45, the Friday Flyers, and the Foucault pendulum. This was a great experience. We learned many things about each one of these important aspects of Clemson. My favorite was probably the Foucault pendulum. This was my group's task to research. Researching the pendulum was interesting to me because I have not heard of anything like this before. I really did not even know this was on campus even though I passed it many times. This shows just how little attention we, college students, pay as we are walking around and getting to our classes. The Foucault pendulum was created by Dr. Albert R. Reed who was a physics and anatomy professor at Clemson University. The pendulum bob is balanced by turning down a lead cylinder cast around a steel rod to a 9.5-inch diameter sphere. This is capped with two brass hemispheres, the lower of which held a permanent magnet. The magnet is a component of the kicker system designed to overcome the damping of the swing. We also learned, on our field trip, that the pendulum uses Faraday's Law. The precession rate can be calculated from apparent forces in the rotating frame on the surface of the Earth. The swing plane should make a complete rotation in 23.9/sin(latitude) hours. For Clemson’s latitude of 34.7 degrees, this is 42 hours. Typically, the precision rate for our pendulum is about 36 hours. We all learned a great amount on this field trip and had fun tricking people with our facts.