…and thankfully, that’s exactly where the original Foucault’s Pendulum was: the Musee des Arts et Metiers (the Museum of Arts and Industry) in Paris. It’s still there, only in mid-May its cable snapped, sending the weight crashing through the floor of the museum.

It was only about 160 years ago that many people were still not convinced the Earth rotates on its own axis. After all, we don’t feel the motion; the Sun, Moon and stars seem to wheel around us, we don’t spin around like a top. Otherwise we’d get seasick on land, surely? Even when it became fairly common belief that the Earth orbited the Sun, the idea that the Earth also spun didn’t have much going for it. What’s to keep us from flying off?

We can be all superior about it now and talk about how the attractive force of the Earth’s gravity is far stronger than any angular momentum we might experience from it’s spin, or about frames of reference, or anything else, but we wouldn’t all have such concrete knowledge of these ideas without the work of Léon Foucault.

No relation to the philosopher and historian Michel Foucault, the physicist Jean Bernard Léon Foucault achieved all manner of great things: he measured the speed of light (with pretty good accuracy, much better than his predecessors), vastly improved the quality of telescopes, and named the gyroscope. But his most famous invention was a large, free-rotating pendulum, suspended in the Panthéon, which slowly changed the direction of its oscillation as the Earth rotated.

Many other such pendulums have been built, and I saw one when I was a boy, set up in the Queen Victoria Building in Sydney. I remember being quite obsessed with it at the time, reading up about its significance, enjoying the rich history of the same experiement being carried out over more than a century and across vast distances. I didn’t know it was only a temporary exhibit until I tried to find it on a trip back to Sydney in 2008, but I relived the joy when I saw another one in operation late last year at the Boston Museum of Science – suspended over a Mayan calendar!

Even the pendulum in the Panthéon was not Foucault’s first, but it was this one that caused a sensation in both scientific and lay circles – and which was irreparably damaged in May. Imagine it in the context of the time: a definite, physical demonstration of the Earth’s rotation! Today, a comparable feat would be to set up a simple demonstration  showing direct evidence of anthropogenic global warming. It’s easily possible to show that even a small amount of CO2 causes an increase in temperature – the wonderful Intelligent Life Magazine recently ran a great article showing you how – and perhaps building such a demonstration in public would silence some of the critics, but it’s hard to imagine it having quite the same impact as Foucault’s simple and elegant experiment did back in 1851.

There’s still a pendulum in the the Panthéon, a replica of the original, and given that party-goers at the Musee des Arts et Metiers had previously pushed the pendulum around, perhaps it’s better to go see the replica. That’s the wonderful thing about science – and indeed art: you might destroy the artefact, but the idea lives on. And if you really want to see a pendulum in action, you can find them all over the world.

I would have loved Dungeons & Dragons as a kid, but in many ways I’m glad I didn’t get into it until much later. When I was young, I got my monster fix not from beholders, gelatinous cubes or goblins, but from mythology – mostly Greek, but also Celtic – and science.

Two of my most treasured books were 50 Facts About Dinosaurs (and how I wish I still owned this – published in 1982, written for children, it is really, really out of date by now) and Monsters of the Deep. Both contained fantastic monsters which, while depicted only by painted illustrations every bit as lurid as those in the Monster Manual, are – or were – real.

All this is brought to mind once again by a news story about dinosaurs – or rather, marine reptiles. Student Raymond Hodgson and groundskeeper Ben Smith found an Icthyosaur fossil in the vegie patch at Richmond State School in western Queensland. The article doesn’t mention how complete a specimen it is, but the icthyosaur is an iconic superstar for anyone who’s familiar with the history of fossil hunting – and if you’re not, I recommend reading up about it. (I have two books on the subject: The Dinosaur Hunters and The Dragon Seekers. Honestly it’s been too long since I read either, and they were both good, but I think it was the latter that I preferred. The former focuses a lot of attention on the rivalry between Gideon Mantell and Richard Owen, though, and that’s quite an exciting back and forth.)

It’s been a busy month for me, as you might imagine, what with four shows in the Comedy Festival and appearances in others. As well as +1 Sword, Dungeon Crawl and the Museum Comedy programme – all of which are going very well, by the way – this Friday is one of the special ones: the Political Asylum Comedy Caucus, two hours of top-notch topical political stand-up from our regular team, plus Rod Quantock and a special international guest (I’ll give you a hint: he’s from New York). On top of all that, it was my birthday, my Mum’s come for a visit, my beloved opened her smashing new cabaret show (First Against the Wall), and I’m still working three days a week.

Hardly surprising then that I’ve not blogged much; I’ve hardly had time to catch up to my beloved in Dragon Age: Origins (which is better than Mass Effect, I think). I had to break my busy silence though to celebrate, because it’s been a good month for science!

First, the Large Hadron Collider has been turned on. It’s been a long time coming, and the world hasn’t ended; indeed the press didn’t seem to notice until it was all over. Now, of course, we have to look at the data that the various sensors and arrays and detectors have collected, and see what it tells us about the Universe. It’s going to be an exciting few years…

It’s also been a good month for Simon Singh. In 2008, he mentioned in an opinion piece in The Guardian that he felt certain chiropractic treatments promoted by the British Chiropractic Association (BCA) were “bogus”. For his trouble, he was sued – successfully, in the first instance – by the BCA under the UK’s harsh libel laws. This week? He won an appeal, and what’s more, the appeal court judges were very critical of the BCA’s behaviour – it looked like it was trying to “silence one of its critics” – and of the original judge, who has “marginalised or underrated the value now placed by the law on public debate”. Read more about it in The Telegraph.

In a similar vein, the University of East Anglia scientists whose emails were stolen and publicised as “Climategate”, which supposedly revealed the “truth” behind the “Anthropogenic Global Warming conspiracy”, were cleared by a parliamentary enquiry. The response recognises that they could have been more open in sharing their data, but most of it was already publicly available and the methods for obtaining and analysing it published. They had a culture of “stonewalling” critics at the university, but then when the majority of requests for your data are from people hoping to undermine your research, that might be forgiven… The main point, though, was that plenty of other institutions have come to the same conclusions from data, so even if they had falsified anything, other research still rejects any notion of a conspiracy.

Those are my reasons for a good month. I’ll talk about them some more, with more jokes in, on Friday night. Maybe I’ll see you there?

It’s official – the Mars Rover, Spirit, is stuck in the mud. Well…sand, but that’s not an amusing cliché. Trapped in the sands of the Martian desert, Spirit has been unable to move for ten months, and has now been declared a “stationary research platform”. The news doesn’t seem to have reached the official NASA Mars Exploration Rover site, but you can find the announcement on their news page.

It seems unlikely we’ll hear much more about Spirit now until it’s covered with enough dust that it cannot recharge via solar power and goes silent forever – or at least until there’s a stiff breeze (as my beloved pointed out, this is not unlike what happens to Wall-E). But it’s striking how the language NASA uses is very…well, very Yes Minister. Spirit isn’t “dead” or “stuck”, it’s “no longer a fully mobile robot”; it’s not “retired”, it’s “entered a new phase”. I kept expecting to hear that it was “very happy with its brave decision” and that we can expect more reports from Spirit “in the fullness of time”. Or even: “Spirit’s close colleague, Opportunity, has not been available for comment.”

But for the definitive last word on the end of Spirit’s active life, I must pass you on to that ever excellent web comic XKCD; their piece on the subject is simply titled “Spirit“.

I’ve seen a bunch of different dinosaur pictures over the years, all of them highly speculative when it comes to colour; the colouration and look of dinosaurs has generally been in the hands of artists, not scientists, because you can’t figure those things out from bones or even skin and feather impressions. But not any more, or at least not for Sinosauropteryx.

Clever, clever  scientists at Bristol University, led by Mike Benton and working with Chinese palaeontologists, have used electron microscopes to find imprints of the melanosomes that carry pigment in hair and feather cells, and by doing so have deduced that Sinosauropteryx – a small theropod in the Compsognathis family, and the earliest dinosaur known to have feathers -  had a “russet” mohawk. (I’m reminded of our old friend Amargasaurus at Melbourne Museum, though its “mohawk” was made of bony spines, not feathers.) Just as importantly, the presence of melanosomes also puts to bed the debate over whether the structures are really feathers: they are.

I wonder now if modern punks will dye their hair in authentic shades from the Cretaceous, or if cosmetics manufacturers will see fit to release “theropod vermillion” rouge or lip gloss? The possibilities are without number…