The world's biggest Foucault pendulum

The world’s biggest Foucault pendulum has been within an easy day trip of Seattle for more than 20 years. Despite being a frequent visitor to Portland, Oregon, I never knew about this wonder of the Rose City until I stumbled upon it this week.

The world’s largest Foucault
pendulum swings inside the north
 tower of the Oregon Convention
Center in Portland.
Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

I was in Portland for the annual conference of an organization called Net Impact. The gathering was held at the Oregon Convention Center, distinctive and noticeable from all over the city for its twin, 320-foot glass spires. Hanging inside one of them is “Principia,” a Foucault pendulum that swings 20 feet above the convention center floor from the end of a 70-foot cable.

OCC claims to be the largest convention center in the Northwest, and “Principia” is part of the center’s art collection valued at more than $2 million. As a testament to the size of the building, I hadn’t even seen the pendulum until the third day of my conference. It was way around the building and up another wing from where Net Impact was meeting. I likely would not have seen it at all had I not opted for a nice long walk after lunch on Saturday.

A bird’s-eye view of “Principia,” the
Foucault pendulum at Oregon Convention
Center. Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

There’s some disagreement about the weight of the 36-inch diameter sphere of the pendulum. A plaque near the installation says it weighs in at 750 pounds, but the website of the artists who built it, Kristin Jones and Andrew Ginzel of New York, puts it at 950 pounds. At any rate, it is big and heavy. The pendulum swings just above a suspended gilt crown 40 feet in diameter. The blue terrazzo floor is spectacular, inlaid with brass rings and colored stone planets that depict a fantasy solar system. It was all installed in 1990 when the Oregon Convention Center was first built.

I shot a quick video of the pendulum with my iPhone camera, and that’s posted below. You can get a much better-quality look at it on the convention center’s 360 tour. It’s a flash feature and the link doesn’t go directly to the Foucault pendulum. When you get there select “exhibit spaces/Exhibit Halls A and B – Pre-function lobbies” from the green tab in the menu on the left of the page. And you can find a bunch of photographs that are a bit better than mine on the OCC Flickr page.

It’s pretty spectacular. Definitely worth a look the next time you’re in Portland.

Making peace between science and faith

Conflict between faith and science is a popular narrative, but Dr. Jennifer Wiseman isn’t buying the story line. Wiseman, senior project scientist for the NASA Hubble Space Telescope Program, spoke last week at a forum on faith and science at Seattle Pacific University.

Dr. Jennifer Wiseman doesn't find faith
and science to be in great conflict.
“Science can give us a better understanding
 of ourselves and our place in creation.”
Photo: AAAS.

“I don’t think that through traditional scientific study that we can suddenly prove the activity of God,” Wiseman said during a keynote address at SPU’s Day of Common Learning. “I don’t even think that’s a positive way to do science. But I do think that if one is inclined to faith in God, for reasons that I think are well founded, you can learn something about the nature of God by looking at the nature of nature.”

Wiseman is well versed in the dynamic as director of the Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and Religion for the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She sees three basic models for that dialogue.

The conflict model holds that science and faith are incompatible. Science tells us what can be measured, while religious belief is superstition that relies on faith without proof. The contrast model finds little overlap, as faith and science are pursuing different questions. In the contact model the two sides learn from and inspire each other. It’s the last two models that Wiseman, a Christian, follows personally.

“Science is focused on the natural world. Science tells us how things work in terms of physical cause and effect,” Wiseman said. “Our scripture and our faith focus for the most part on the bigger, even more important questions: Why? Is there a purpose? Who? Is there a God? What does God want of me? How should we live?”

When Wiseman talks about the amazing discoveries in astronomy, God is there. She refers to stars as God’s factories for creating heavy elements, and to gravitational lensing is God’s magnifying glass. But while she finds in science the inspiration for praise and worship, she says that religion doesn’t color her eyepiece or alter scientific fact.

“The beauty of science is that it shouldn’t matter what your faith is,” she said. “I do science experiments with colleagues from many different faiths and cultures, and we all come to the same scientific conclusions. If we don’t, we look into the science and see who’s doing the wrong kind of analysis. Do we have the same philosophical conclusions after we get the scientific conclusions? Not necessarily. That’s when you get into these other non-scientific but important questions of is there evidence for God’s beauty and handiwork and what’s our role in life.”

Wiseman acknowledged barriers for understanding between faith and science. She said lack of good science education can make it difficult for some to find the relevance of science, that it can be tough to disentangle political views from science, and that some theologians are driven into a tizzy by the notion that there may be life elsewhere. Natural disasters also often prove to be a stumbling block.
“Plate tectonics allows life to thrive and our atmosphere to be refreshed,” Wiseman noted. “But say that to someone who has experienced an earthquake. They’re not going to say, ‘Praise God for plate tectonics.’”

“We don’t quite understand the mysteries of how the natural processes of the world that can bring so much good can also bring so much suffering, and that’s a major impediment to faith in God for many people,” she said.

Wiseman spoke glowingly of Hubble and the volumes of data and images it has produced both for scientists to study and for people to enjoy. She said she often gets questions about whether gazing out into the cosmos is worth the expense and effort, given the challenges we face at home on Earth.

“We need a balance between addressing the difficult problems on our planet while also inspiring people and looking out into the big picture of what it means to be human,” Wiseman said.
“Science can give us a better understanding of ourselves and our place in creation.”

MLO intro in Seattle

A promising new weapon against light pollution will receive a formal introduction at an event in Seattle Wednesday. Nancy Clanton, a board member of the International Dark-Sky Association (IDA) and member of the Illuminating Engineering Society of North America (IES), will present a workshop about the Model Lighting Ordinance (MLO) at 10 a.m. October 26 at the Lighting Design Lab, located at 2915 Fourth Avenue South in Seattle.

A workshop on the IDA/IES Model Lighting Ordinance
will be held Oct. 26 at the Lighting Design Lab in Seattle.

A task force of the IDA and the IES spent seven years hammering out the details of the model lighting ordinance. It is intended as a guide for environmentally responsible outdoor lighting, and was designed to help municipalities develop outdoor lighting standards that reduce glare, light trespass, and skyglow.

Clanton, who co-chaired the task force, says the process took so long in part because the two organizations started with different sets of goals.

“It wasn’t even a compromise,” she said of the final version of the MLO approved this summer. “We actually blended the goals together and got a really good ordinance that addresses everyone’s concerns.”

The stars aligned to bring this rollout of the MLO to Seattle, according to Scott Kardel, public affairs director for the IDA.

“We’ve chosen Seattle to be the first site partly because Seattle and the Pacific Northwest is a progressive, happening area where people are interested in things like energy conservation,” Kardel said. “Also we have a very active chapter of the IDA, Dark Skies Northwest. It’s a good combination of being able to have our local chapter involved in promoting the event but in an area where we think it has a good chance to have good reception.”

Clanton said the four-hour workshop will give participants a lot of good information about the MLO.

“Here’s what it is, here’s how it was developed, and let us show you some examples of how it could be applied,” was her quick outline of the agenda. “It’s going to be an introduction, answering questions about the different parts of the MLO, and an encouragement for people to bring it to their cities and communities and start looking at adoption.” She noted that the workshop would be useful for city planners as well as for interested advocates who want to learn how to bring better lighting ordinances to their communities.

Clanton said that the city of Plymouth, Minnesota adopted an early version of the Model Lighting Ordinance, which was a big help as they worked through the process. Now Anchorage may be about ready to go to work on adopting the version approved this summer. Both she and Kardel noted that often cities will plow ahead on their own with lighting ordinances, using information from the IDA website, but not telling anyone or availing themselves of the association’s technical expertise. Clanton added that the MLO is not a product that’s ready to adopt off the shelf, but more of a template.

“The model lighting ordinance is supposed to be the technical part of a standard lighting ordinance,” she said, adding that they’ve included placeholder language for intent and the like, but that each community should customize the MLO based on its particular needs. “We had to write this ordinance as if it were a small village or New York City.”

Sky glow is a big deal in Tucson, with Kitt Peak, Mount Lemmon, and Mount Graham observatories in the neighborhood. Kardel said that Tucson, also home base to the IDA, is a prime example for us that lighting ordinances work to curb light pollution.

“We’ve had a big increase in population over the last several decades but have been able to hold on to the level of sky brightness, even with more people and more houses and more lights in the area,” Kardel said. “A good ordinance can do a good job to either hold on to what you have or make things better.”

Clanton gave a shout-out to amateur astronomers for their diligence on these issues.

“The astronomy community has been such a wonderful, vocal voice on light pollution,” she noted. “Without them, I don’t think a lot would have been established. They have been the grass roots in all kinds of light pollution ordinances.”

Cost to attend the workshop is $75 and includes lunch. Sign up here or visit the IDA website for more information.

We can READ about the Sun

With old Sol threatening to vanish from Seattle skies until July, we can take some comfort in the fact that we’ll at least be able to read about our life-giving star. Bob Berman’s new book, The Sun’s Heartbeat: And Other Stories from the Life of the Star That Powers Our Planet (Little, Brown & Co., 2011), is here in the nick of time!

Berman is my favorite columnist in Astronomy magazine because of the wry humor he injects into his essays. The book is more of the same: twenty chapters of solid science written in a highly approachable and often humorous way. Even the chapter names are funny. Chapter 11 is titled, “The Sun Brings Death.” Chapter 12 then proclaims, “The Sun Can Save Your Life.” It’s not a contradiction.

The Sun’s Heartbeat is more than just the usual account of stellar formation and life cycle, though that’s all in there, too. Berman includes much about the history of solar science, including interesting tales about how the distance to the Sun was determined and how sunspots were figured out. By coincidence, I was reading the chapter on neutrinos just as the news broke last week that scientists in Switzerland had clocked some of these particles whizzing at faster than the speed of light, much to the chagrin of Einstein’s ghost. The jury is still out on that particular discovery and whether we have to discard the Theory of Relativity.

Berman devotes a good chunk of real estate in Heartbeat to anthropogenic climate forcing, climate change or global warming to most of us, and the Sun’s part in how hot or cool it is on Earth. There’s a great discussion of our current mania for protecting ourselves from all exposure to sunlight, and whether the resultant lack of vitamin D is contributing to maladies such as autism and causing more cancer than the sunblock prevents. It’s quite a dilemma for those of us fair-skinned, freckly, burn-don’t-tan types.

The book is at its most personal and engaging when Berman waxes poetic about his favorite sun-related phenomena. “Nothing outside of a birth or an IRS audit can produce such sobbing or reverential silence like a total solar eclipse or the fabled northern lights,” he writes. He describes beautifully the profound feelings of awe he’s had with every solar eclipse he’s seen, ever since his first in March of 1970 in Virginia Beach. It’s enough to get you to circle the dates now of the next total eclipses that will cross the U.S., on Aug. 21, 2017, and April 8, 2024. The former will be the first such event in the U.S. in 38 years.

The Sun’s Heartbeat is informative and entertaining. Give it a look!

Hindsight and Popular Astronomy a good read

For those interested in the history of astronomy, Dr. Alan Whiting’s book Hindsight and Popular Astronomy is an interesting read. Whiting’s premise is simple: let’s take a close look at nine books, aimed generally at a non-scientific audience, published between 1833 and 1944, and written by some of the giants of the science. Let’s see how well they stand up today, and where there are mistakes, see how they happened and how a lay reader might have seen them coming.

While our vision is pretty acute in hindsight, the book is hardy a “gotcha” tome. Whiting is careful to point out that the authors include some of the great thinkers of astronomy, from Sir John Herschel to Sir James Jeans. In fact, he says that most of what Herschel wrote, for example, would stand up well in astronomy texts today. But there were a few whoppers.

The books Whiting examines in Hindsight are:

• A Treatise on Astronomy, Sir John Herschel, 1833
• A Popular Astronomy, Sir George Biddell Airy, 1848
• Outlines Of Astronomy, 10th edition, Herschel, 1869
• Popular Astronomy, Simon Newcomb, 1878
• In the High Heavens, Sir Robert S. Ball, 1893
• Astronomy for Everybody, Newcomb, 1902
• The Universe Around Us, first edition, Sir James Jeans, 1929
• Stars And Atoms, third impression, Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, 1928
• The Universe Around Us, fourth edition, Jeans, 1944

Each book gets its own chapter in Hindsight. Whiting sets the stage, explains the context in which the book was written, talks about what the author got right, then delves into what went wrong and why. While he leaves out the heavy math, he does sprinkle in a few chapters on basic astronomical observation and calculation, astrophysics, and quanta and relativity, just to get everyone, if not up to speed, exactly, then at least a bit conversant in the new topics the writers had to deal with.

Going back to Herschel’s Treatise on Astronomy, as noted Whiting says Sir John got most of it right, but made some major mistakes in his discussion of Saturn’s rings. Herschel noted that the rings were solid, that an eccentric ring would be stable, that the rings were observed to be eccentric, and that a periodic disturbance would stabilize an otherwise unstable ring. All of these statements are wrong. Whiting notes that the errors come variously from unexamined assumptions, relying on the work of others that contained mathematical errors, and trusting your eyes too much.

Throughout, sometimes even the greatest of the scientists fell into such bad habits of being most willing to believe that which supports his own theory.

While accessible, Hindsight and Popular Astronomy is not exactly a beach read. It’s a scholarly book that’s going make you stop often and think. It also makes me want to read some of the original works Whiting examines. Most are available, largely in reproduction format; the links above go to Amazon pages for such books. Skulking about the library or used book shops may be of some help as well.

Whiting is a professional astronomer and an Honorary Research Associate and Visiting Astronomer with the Astrophysics and Space Research Group at the University of Birmingham in the U.K. He’s also a member of the Seattle Astronomical Society, and can often be found on open house nights at the Theodor Jacobsen Observatory at the University of Washington, or sharing observing insights on Through the Clouds, the SAS Google group.