Le pendule de Foucault a exercé sur les savants belges une fascination durable. Dès 1852, l’expérience de Foucault suscite l’intérêt de Schaar, Pagani et Gilbert. À la suite des travaux de Mach, Duhamel, Poincaré, Duhem et d’autres mathématiciens, physiciens et philosophes, les publications de la Société scientifique de Bruxelles abritent de vives discussions sur les notions d’espace et de mouvement absolus, entre les savants belges De Tilly, Mansion et Pasquier et leurs collègues français Vicaire et Lechalas. Le cinquantième anniversaire de (...) l’expérience de Foucault est l’occasion d’une polémique entre Anspach et Pasquier, ce dernier défendant les idées de Poincaré. Au vingtième siècle, les études de Janne d’Othée et Bouny sur le pendule de Foucault montrent qu’ils sont définitivement acquis aux idées de Poincaré.Foucault’s pendulum has long fascinated Belgian scientists. From 1852 onward, the Foucault experiment attracted the interest of Schaar, Pagani and Gilbert. Following the work of Mach, Duhamel, Poincaré, Duhem and other mathematicians, physicists and philosophers, the publications of the Société scientifique de Bruxelles contain lively discussions of the concepts of absolute space and motion between the Belgian scientists De Tilly, Mansion, Pasquier and their French colleagues Vicaire and Lechalas. The fiftieth anniversary of Foucault’s experiment is the source of a polemic between Anspach and Pasquier, the latter defending Poincaré’s ideas against the former. In the twentieth century, the studies of Janne d’Othée and Bouny about Foucault’s pendulum show that Poincaré’s thesis has been fully adopted. (shrink)

It is usually claimed that the Laguerre polynomials were popularized by Schrödinger when creating wave mechanics; however, we show that he did not immediately identify them in studying the hydrogen atom. In the case of relativistic Dirac equations for an electron in a Coulomb field, Dirac gave only approximations, Gordon and Darwin gave exact solutions, and Pidduck first explicitly and elegantly introduced the Laguerre polynomials, an approach neglected by most modern treatises and articles. That Laguerre polynomials were not very popular (...) before their use in quantum mechanics, probably because they had been little used in classical mathematical physics, is confirmed by the fact that, as we show, they had been rediscovered independently several times during the nineteenth century, in published or unpublished studies of Abel, Murphy, Chebyshev, and Laguerre. (shrink)