Abstract
The life and work of the French physicist Léon Foucault (1819–1868) has inspired a surprising amount of artistic creation which is reported here. Most creation centres on Foucault’s pendulum and gyroscope, though often the inspiration is not his demonstrations of the rotation of the Earth but Umberto Eco’s post-modern novel Foucault’s Pendulum, and for the gyroscope the metaphor of spinning and turning rather than the device’s orientational stability. Transits of Venus have inspired much more artistic creation than Foucault, and this is attributed to the impact of a mythological connection of the Cytherean planet with love and sex.
With great sadness we note that William Tobin passed away on 7 July 2022. William submitted his paper for the WayneFest in February and was able to make a number of changes while undergoing treatment for his illness. We are grateful to his wife Laurence and to his friend and colleague James Lequeux for their help in preparing this final version of William’s paper.
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Notes
- 1.
Copies of the Garnier bust are to be found at the Paris Observatory, the École Normale Supérieure, the University Paul Sabatier in Toulouse and on Foucault’s tomb. For the Mengue bust, the plaster is at the Musée d’art et d’industrie in Roubaix while the much-eroded marble is held by the Institut de France’s Musée Jacquemart-André.
- 2.
Earlier, the poem evokes wind and rain “all across Massachusetts.” I thank the poet (now Sharona Muir) for confirming that this is a confusion, but she notes that ‘Massachusetts’ provides a “cascade of mixed, tumultuous stresses that to [her – and my] ear convey the force of the wind in trees shedding their leaves” absent if ‘New Hampshire’ is substituted.
- 3.
Initially, the work was Sans titre (Centre d’art contemporain de Vassivière et al., 1995).
- 4.
Historical accuracy is lost here. Two planes are illustrated. Neither is Blériot XI, which is the one in the collections of the Musée des Arts et Métiers. Blériot XI was the first plane to fly across the Channel, in 1909. Another inaccuracy is the pendulum bob shown on the cover of Les chroniques de Plateterre, which is an poorly-performing large one from the Musée’s collection that has no known connexion with Foucault (Tobin, 2003: Fig. 9.39; Tobin et al., 2007). The same error is made by Mortensen (2010).
- 5.
The Charron ring and its operation are prominent on the livestream of Richter’s installation. www.stadt-muenster.de/dominikanerkirche/webcam. (Accessed 5 January 2022).
- 6.
The quote comes from the descriptions accompanying images of Pearson’s lithographs on New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art website metmuseum.org. Images of three different Man Ray rayographs of toy gyroscopes can be found on the websites moma.org (Museum of Modern Art, New York), centrepompidou.fr (Centre Pompidou, Paris) and artic.edu (Art Institute of Chicago, which also presents images of Donald Robert’s lithographs).
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Acknowledgments
Grateful thanks go to Olivier Caijo, Pierre Collin, Lily Hibberd, Sharona Muir, Joséphine Lavrotte, Marie-Françoise Le Saux, Veronika Rehackova, Vladimír Škoda, Axel Schnuch, Simon Weber-Unger and Romain Viornery.
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Tobin, W. (2023). The Life and Science of Léon Foucault as a Muse. In: Gullberg, S., Robertson, P. (eds) Essays on Astronomical History and Heritage. Historical & Cultural Astronomy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29493-8_6
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