Stinky one. Thx.
How can the pendulum prove anything if it is not at either pole. Sure the earth is dragging it anywhere else?
Oh....btw.. i do know re theory so no basic lessons please to all!
The focault pendulum is easiest to understand if you imagine it to be at the pole - but so long as it's not too close to the equator, the fact of the Earth's rotation is still enough to provide a little push to the pendulum in each swing.
The math (well, the physics actually) gets really complicated - but there are hundreds of these pendulums in museums around the world and you don't have to watch one for very long to see that the direction of the swing gradually changes over a 24 hour period.
The Flat Earth explanation is hokey in the extreme. According to the Wiki, there are two conflicting arguments:
Rowbotham: "Summarily, the line of the pendula must be 25 meters in length to get the minimum effect, and so by necessity, Leon Focault's original experiments between latitudes were conducted outside hung from a tree exposed to the elements. Dr. Rowbotham finds that the variations of the pendula are caused entirely by the contraction and expansion of its line due to temperature variations upon the earth's surface in relation to the nearness of the Sun. These variations match up perfectly with the official published results of Focault's experiments."
...well, that's bullshit. Focault pendulums would work at any length if you could keep them swinging for long enough - but air resistance slows them down. So to do a practical demonstration, you need a heavy weight and a long length to overcome air resistance for long enough to make for a decent demonstration. In a vacuum, you could make a focault pendulum well under a meter long. Modern demonstrations are inside museums - which are generally air-conditioned buildings where there's no wind and who's temperature scarcely varies (and certainly not over the period of minutes to hours needed to show the effect clearly).
Then we have another claim (which contradicts the first one):
"Mach's Principle explains that if the earth was still and the all the stars went around the Earth then the gravitational pull of the stars would pull the pendulum. As Mach said "The universe is not twice given, with an earth at rest and an earth in motion; but only once, with its relative motions alone determinable. It is accordingly, not permitted us to say how things would be if the earth did not rotate."
Sadly (for the FE'ers) Mach's Principle has long ago been disproven. It's not even "officially" a principle - it's a "conjecture" and it's so vaguely put together as to be unusable. Read the Wikipedia article.
At any rate - the stars are evenly distributed around the sky, so their gravitation sums to zero in RET and to a tiny upward pull in FET. If the Focault effect was due to gravity, then it would be overwhelmed by the (claimed) lunar gravity that the FE'ers use to explain the tides (well, one of them!).
FE cannot explain the Focault pendulum...at least not by means of either of the bogus claims on the Wiki,