FOUCAULT--UNINDICTED CO-CONSPIRATOR

How can I trick you into THINKING about something? I wish I knew. All I can do is keep trying.
If I had been exposed to Coriolis as a young student I am fairly sure I wouldn't be writing this now. I would probably have swallowed it, as one other bit of knowledge one was expected to absorb--like you did. It would have been like meeting someone at a family reunion and automatically accepting him as family. But my formal education had long since ended before I decided I wanted to really get to know Coriolis. So my perspective was rather different than it would have been as a teen-ager.
I was about 50 years old when my Coriolis quest began.
I had confidence in my own mind--my ability to reason. Back in Oklahoma,as a high school senior, I had won the most prestigious academic scholarship in the state. 4 years later, I had made a 726 on the LSAT.
My wife and daughter and I visited Washington about twenty years ago, including the basic whirlwind tour of the Smithsonian Museums. I was fascinated by the Foucault Pendulum exhibit. For some reason that pendulum got itself filed away with all the other unfinished projects in my cluttered mental basement. My favorite puzzles are the tough ones. When I find a NY Times crossword that I can't just sail through, it's like finding treasure. If I ever get 'stumped' I consider that a temporary condition. I save those puzzles and go back to them. I guess that same quirk is what made me file that pendulum away, and then drag it out a few years later. I resolved to work my way through that pendulum, the way Click & Clack work through a car malfunction. An old friend of mine climbed Mt. Ranier a while back. Glaciers. Snow storms. Serious danger. The whole bit. I thought to myself, " he's nuts".

But then I tackle a hugely complex Physics problem, investing thousands of hours and most of my spare energy, year after year, in something that to most people (such as my family) would seem just as nutty--if not moreso--as amateur mountain climbing. Go figure.

I was after that deep satisfaction you experience when you successfully work out an especially tough NY Times crossword. When you finally untangle all of last year's strings of Christmas lights. When you work and tinker and slave on an old car and then turn the key and WOW!--the engine starts and keeps running and purrs and throbs. That's the feeling I was after. But there was no such happy ending to be found in the world of Coriolis and Foucault. To understand them is to find utter disappointment--because they are frauds.

If you set out to understand Foucault's Pendulum, you will be sent down the hall to visit Coriolis.
You will soon find that Coriolis proves Foucault, and at the same time that Foucault proves Coriolis. It's all quite circular--and specious--by nature.

There is a helluva difference between the math and the physics of Coriolis. If you can't see the distinction, then you're wasting your time here--and you'll never get the point.

Coriolis declared that since Earth is known to rotate, it is proper to regard Earth-surface motion as occurring against the backdrop of a (very large) rotating frame of reference. His proofs were all hypothetical, but were accepted, nonetheless. Foucault found that a spherical pendulum ambulates. He married that phenomenon with the Coriolis hypothesis, and the world bought it:
the ambulating pendulum was taken as forensic evidence of the efficacy of the Coriolis hypothesis. Horse manure.

What Foucault's Pendulum proves is that a spherical pendulum does dot vibrate in a plane. No more. No less. The contrivances Foucault performed to "eliminate any deflecting mechanical influence on the vibration of the pendulum's bob" were impressive. Impressive enough to take the whole world in. But it was all just an elaborate conjurer's trick. Just a show. Isn't the simplest explanation supposed to be best? Well: A truly spherical pendulum does not vibrate in a plane. So the whole premise of Foucault's 'experiment' is faulty. It has nothing to do with anybody's frame of reference.

Furthermore, Coriolis' model of Earth as rotating frame of reference is totally inapplicable to Earth-surface motion. Earth is a spherical (aren't they all?) gravitational field which sails spinning through space. If a particle belongs to that gravitational field, then by essence it sails and spins along with the field. That sailing and spinning are an integral part of the very being (mass) of that particle. There is only one way around that physical fact--and that is to escape from the gravitational field (something we call attaining orbit velocity). It is ONLY when moving at (or above) orbit velocity that an Earth particle may properly regard Earth's rotating surface as an accelerator. Any particle moving at lesser velocities continues--by its very nature-- to rotate Eastward at a rate of 360 degrees per day. THAT is the proper frame of reference for the physics of Earth-surface motion. Earth--and every one of her particles--rotate Eastward at the rate of 360 degrees per day. Which sounds like the classic definition of rotation: An object is said to be in rotation if all of its particles circle a common axis at a common angular velicity.

So: the Physics lesson from Foucault's Pendulum is that spherical pendula roam. And the true
Physics lesson from Coriolis' rotating frame of reference is NIL. The physical value of Earth's rotation upon spherical pendula, weather, artillery, missiles and turtles is NIL. The mathematical value of the Coriolis Effect on any sub-orbital Earth-surface motion is, always has been and always will be: NIL.