North Coast Imports, Inc.

From Officine Panerai : The exhibition "Galileo's Telescope - The Instrument that Changed the World", created by the Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza in Florence and sponsored by Officine Panerai, is open from October 10th, 2009 to January 17th, 2010. Galileo's telescopes are housed in the Museo di Storia della Scienza in Florence. The instrument on show in Stockholm is displayed for the first time outside Italy. The exhibition consists of six sections featuring beautifully crafted replicas of some of the instruments housed in the Museo di Storia della Scienza as well as important documentation and a significant selection of visual material, included extraordinary unpublished photographs taken through Galileo's telescope. The show also includes the extraordinary "Jupiterium ", expressly conceived and realized by Officine Panerai for the exhibition, displays the movements of the Sun, of Jupiter and his moons through a unique, mechanical scale mode...

We know what a pendulum is. It's a great device for producing regular periods, which is especially useful in mechanical clocks, when you want to break down fast power into smaller intervals (like seconds). Galileo Galilei discovered it around 1602 and Christiaan Huygens was the first to use it in a clock for accurate escapement in 1656. But what if you turned it upside down? It's easy to do by hand. Take a long rod and balance it on the palm of your hand. In order to keep it up, it requires finite adjustments by your hand. A little to the left... right... forward... Don't let it fall! Your brain accepts input from your eyes and feel of the weight on your hand to see which way the rod begins to fall, and tells your arm and hand to adjust as necessary to keep the bottom of the rod under the top... keeping it balanced. It's not that difficult to do for someone as intelligent as ourselves. Could that control be synthesized? Imagine the possibility... ...or, just l...