Foucault pendulum in the curch Pöllau

and yet it moves!
Since the dawn of humanity, our species has sought the why and how of our existence on Earth. Mentally, the Earth, and thus
we humans, has mostly stood at the center. Yes, and the world outside (sun, moon, stars) circled around us, felt timelessly eternal.
With the awareness of our mortality and the longing for eternal life, hundreds of creation stories emerged to understand and explain this mystery.
It was only about 400 years ago that the understanding of natural scientific laws solidified to explain the connections in the cosmos. Through experiments, the validity of the laws has been and is being tested.
Until the 17th century, there was the fixed notion of a geocentric worldview, at least in Europe (Earth and humanity as the center of the universe).

In the 17th century, through physical observations of the sky with Giordano Bruno, Galileo Galilei, Nikolai Copernicus, Johannes Kepler ... the worldview from a scientific perspective changed radically. The new insights into the laws of celestial mechanics prevailed. Meanwhile, the Church clung to the old for a long time, instead of recognizing that nature with its laws – from the perspective of faith – is part of God's creation plan, and it is the task of science to describe these laws.
Result:
The Earth and thus we humans are not the center of the universe.
It is not the sun and the stars that revolve around the Earth, but the Earth spins on its own axis and orbits the sun once a year at the edge of our inconspicuous galaxy, the Milky Way.
In 1851, Leon Foucault demonstrated Earth's rotation to a broad public with his spectacular pendulum experiment in the Pantheon of Paris. The pendulum always swings back and forth in the same direction when not influenced by external forces. At the rosette on the ground, one can see that the Earth continues to rotate "beneath the pendulum!"
For the faithful, the pendulum can also tell something of the mystery of creation in its deliberate, seemingly uniform motion.

Foucault's Pendulum shows the rotation of the Earth
In 1851, Léon Foucault conducted a spectacular experiment in the Pantheon of Paris: A 28 kg brass ball was suspended from a 67 m long steel cable and set into motion.
After some time, it was observed that the pendulum's plane of oscillation seemed to have shifted. In reality, however, the Earth continued to turn beneath the pendulum. This was one of the first experiments to provide direct evidence of Earth's rotation.
You can admire a scaled-down replica of this experiment here!