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Shae Small
This is Leon, as we affectionately call him.
He is a Foucault pendulum.
Leon has many visitors. Several groups come to see Leon.
We have field trips from area school children.
It's nice to have a unique feature like this.
We like to think that we're more fit because we enjoy taking our staircase, rather than taking the elevator.
What Leon brings to us, here in this building, is I guess you would say sort of like Zen therapy.
Michael Marder
The ability to measure time precisely is one of the foundations of all of science.
There's a story that Galileo saw an incense burner swinging in a church and, from that, got the idea of measuring time with the pendulum.
One way you might try to measure time is with your pulse, but your pulse changes.
When you're excited, it goes fast. When you're calm, it's slower.
What the pendulum did was make it possible to build something that would then tell time very precisely.
If you're on the North Pole, then the plane of the pendulum will appear to rotate once every 24 hours,
because the pendulum just stays where it is.
It has this absolute sense of location in the universe, and the earth rotates under it.
So really the pendulum is figuring out how to remain stationary, and the world turns around beneath it.
If you were at the Equator, by contrast, the plane of the pendulum would never rotate.
The pendulum would just follow the Earth around.
In that simple motion is the difference between being able to measure time and not being able to measure time,
which is a pretty significant thing.
Shae Small
Whenever someone comes in and the pendulum is not swinging,
it's a critical call to maintenance to make sure that everything is okay again.
David Dedear
This is the electronic controls for the pendulum.
There's a magnet up there, that every time the beam is broken, it tells the electronics over here where the pendulum is located.
And it gives it just a little boost, just enough to keep it running.
This is the current that goes through the magnet, and this is the time that it's on. The amount would be amplitude.
It's not something you just set it and hope that it goes.
You have to set it and just keep tweaking it a little bit until you get it where it should be.
Electronics is my background.
My mother wanted me to, you know, take music so I think I was in the band a short while.
And when I told the bandleader, I said "I believe I'm going to quit," he said, "Good."
I don't know how to read music. I can read a schematic, but music? No.
Just a man behind the scenes, is all.
Michael Marder
The Austin Chronicle has said this is one of the most Zen-like places in Austin.
So, you should go there. You should relax.
And then you should think about the marvelous fact that by hanging a pendulum in a four story building,
you can figure out that the earth turns.
Shae Small
When we enter our building here and we find that Leon is in motion,
it is very reassuring that our world is still turning, and that all is well here at the DEV Building.
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