Mantovani, Roberto: Before Foucault. The Proofs of the Earth’s Rotation

Transversal: International Journal for the Historiography of Science:58-69. 2019We are going to trace the ideas and experiments, since Galileo and until Léon Foucault, aimed at proving the Earth’s rotation. Galileo, incorrectly, tried to explain the phenomenon of tidal forward and backward flow with the Earth’s rotation. After Galileo, the cannon shots towards the zenith and the experiments on falling objects were considered reliable evidence. At the end of the XVII century, Newton had the ide