Word: pendulum
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
FOUCAULT'S PENDULUM by Umberto Eco (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; $22.95). Eco has woven together a novel that is even more intricate and absorbing than his international best seller The Name of the Rose. Beneath its endlessly diverting surface, this book constitutes a litmus test for ways of looking at history and the world...
FOUCAULT'S PENDULUM...
...named Casaubon hides after closing time in a Paris museum called the Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers. Nearby, an enormous pendulum swings silently in the gathering darkness, mute testimony, as a 19th century French scientist named Foucault first demonstrated, to the rotation of the earth. Casaubon is here because he suspects something terrible will happen before dawn. If he is correct, then he and two friends, playful inventors of a plot to rule the world, do not have long to live. In their machinations, have he and his coconspirators accidentally stumbled across some dangerous truth? Or, % perhaps worse, have their...
From this spooky, arresting premise, Umberto Eco has launched a novel that is even more intricate and absorbing than his international best seller The Name of the Rose (1983). Unlike its predecessor, Foucault's Pendulum does not restrict its range of interests to monastic, medieval arcana. This time Eco's framework is vast -- capacious enough to embrace reams of ancient, abstruse writings and a host of contemporary references or allusions. The latter include the Yellow Submarine, Casablanca, Tom and Jerry, Lina Wertmuller, Barbara Cartland, Stephen King, Superman, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Flash Gordon, the Pink Panther, Minnie Mouse...
...prize for his contributions in pioneering a method of measuring the minute movements that occur inside atoms. Ramsey's so-called separated oscillatory fields technique did not just become a valuable scientific tool; it also provided the basis for modern-day atomic clocks. Like the ticking of a pendulum in a grandfather clock, the rapid-fire (9,192,631.770 times a second) oscillations of cesium-atom nuclei, spinning like tops inside a magnetic field, can be used to pace off time...