Science & Education 13: 261–277, 2004. © 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. 261 The Pendulum: Its Place in Science, Culture and Pedagogy MICHAEL R. MATTHEWS 1 , COLIN GAULD 1 and ARTHUR STINNER 2 1 School of Education, University of New South Wales, Sydney 2052, Australia; 2 Faculty of Education, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba R3T 2N2, Canada Abstract. The study and utilisation of pendulum motion has had immense scientific, cultural, horological, philosophical, and educational impact. The International Pendulum Project (IPP) is a collaborative research effort examining this impact, and demonstrating how historical studies of pendulum motion can assist teachers to improve science education by developing enriched curricular material, and by showing connections between pendulum studies and other parts of the school programme especially mathematics, social studies and music. The Project involves about forty re- searchers in sixteen countries plus a large number of participating school teachers. 1 The pendulum is a universal topic in university mechanics courses, high school science subjects, and elementary school programmes, thus an enriched approach to its study can result in deepened science literacy across the whole educational spectrum. Such literacy will be manifest in a better appreciation of the part played by science in the development of society and culture. The Pendulum in Western Science The pendulum has played a significant role in the development of Western science, culture and society. The pendulum was studied by Galileo, Huygens, Newton, Hooke and all the leading figures of seventeenth-century science. The pendulum was crucial for, among other things, establishing the collision laws, the conserva- tion laws, the value of the acceleration due to gravity g, ascertaining the variation in g from equatorial to polar regions and hence discovering the oblate shape of the earth, and, perhaps most importantly, it provided the crucial evidence for Newton’s synthesis of terrestrial and celestial mechanics. The pendulum was important for the Galileo’s new science, and it had a cen- tral place in Newton’s physics, with the historian Richard Westfall remarking that ‘without the pendulum, there would be no Principia’ (Westfall 1990, p. 82). Sub- sequently the pendulum was at the core of classical mechanics as it developed through the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with the work of Stokes, Atwood and Eötvos being especially notable. Foucault’s pendulum, as well as providing dynamical evidence for the rotation of the earth, also played a role in the popularisation of science in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Conlin 1999, Aczel 2003). Pendulum measurements enabled the shape of the