Foucault's Pendulum - the device, clearly prove the Earth's rotation around its axis.It is named after its inventor, French scientist Jean-Leon Foucault, who first demonstrated its effect in the Paris Pantheon, in 1851.At first glance, the device of the pendulum is no big deal.It's an easy ball suspended from the dome of the tallest building on the long rope (67 meters during the first experience).If you push the pendulum, then a few minutes later the ball will not move in a straight line vibration amplitude, and "to write eight".Such movement gives the ball rotation of our planet.
Now the device is stored in the original Paris Museum of Crafts in the church of St. Martin in the Fields, and copies are widely replicated and used in many natural history museums.On the expanse of native Foucault pendulum somehow used as an argument for the nonexistence of God.However innocent visual aid was destined to wider fame - literary.For it was the title of a famous novel.
Work by Umberto Eco, "Foucault's Pendulum" is considered a model of post-modernism.Author - very well read and erudite man - literally bombarded the reader quotations, allusions and references to other literary works, historical facts and sources.Admirers of this writer advised to read his books, having at hand a large encyclopedia.But do not shake their knowledge and enlighten people willing Eco - his plan more ambitious.
The plot of the book seems quite realistic: the student Casaubon wrote a treatise on the monastic Order of the Knights Templar.He becomes friends with Belbo and Dtotallevi, employees of the publishing house "Garamon."Next story slightly slides off the solid ground of reality in a foggy area of untested hypotheses, assumptions, esoteric fantasies and myths.At the head of the readers showered as historical facts about the Knights Templar, and lengthy quotations from the Kabbalah, "Chemical Wedding" Rosicrucians, and another Gnostic formulas and information on the magical significance of numbers by the Pythagoreans.The protagonist of the novel "Foucault's Pendulum" think about the posthumous fate of the Knights Templar organization, especially after a colonel, having appeared in the publishing house, leaves them "Plan of the Knights of the Temple", which is inscribed forever.The fact that the next day the military disappears, only reinforces the confidence Kazobona that document - not a fake.
protagonist gradually lost all solid ground under their feet the truth.Pavlikians and Rosicrucians, the Assassins, the Jesuits, and the Nestorians replace him real people.Casaubon himself becomes "oderzhimtsem" fully believing in the plan, although his girlfriend Leah and assures that the document - only calculations seller from the store colors.But too late: the fevered imagination tells the hero that they should seek telluric axis of the world at the Paris church of Saint Martin, which now houses the Museum of Crafts and where rocks under the dome the Foucault pendulum.There they are attacked by a crowd of other "oderzhimtsev" wanting to seize up and discover the key to absolute power - Hermetic, Gnostics, the Pythagoreans, and the alchemists.They kill Belbo and Leah.
What to say in his novel "Foucault's Pendulum" by Umberto Eco?That spirituality - the opium of the intellectuals as a religion - for the people?Or that Nav, is only to touch it, get out into the real world, both from the Pandora's Box?Or that the search for golden key with which you can control the world, wrapped in that the seeker becomes a pawn in the game of unknown forces?To answer this question the author gives to the reader.
