Nobody likes to encourage daydreaming...
Illustration
Nobody likes to encourage daydreaming or wool-gathering in church, but it often happens that in such a quiet and relaxed setting some great truth can pierce the human intellect. One of the great discoveries of the Renaissance occurred when a young man named Galileo Galilei let his mind wander during prayers in the Cathedral of Pisa, Italy. His attention was drawn to hanging lamps over the altar, which were swaying slightly. He noticed that no matter how widely the lamps swung, the time it took them to move from one end of their arc to the other was the same. He felt his own pulse in order to time the swings of the lamps. Later a Dutch physicist named Huygens added to this the discovery that the time of a pendulum's swing varies not with the width of the swing, but with the length of the pendulum. While this may not seem earth-shaking, it was this discovery that made possible the construction of mechanical clocks. It is the principle still used for grandfather's clocks and other pendulum clocks. It was a basic advance in the development of mechanical timepieces. Your wristwatch owes a debt to Galileo's distraction during the church service!
