The Life and Science of Léon Foucault: The man who proved the Earth rotates By William Tobin, Cambridge University Press, £40/$60, ISBN 0521808553 Reviewed by David Hughes
A VERY long pendulum has kept Léon Foucault famous. But as William Tobin’s thorough, readable and beautifully illustrated biography reveals, there was much more to this self-taught French 19th-century experimental physicist.
Foucault (1819-1868) began his adult life as a happy amateur, with science as a Sunday recreation. After spending 10 years supporting himself as a science journalist, he passed his last 12 years as a government employee at the Paris Observatory.…
