[geocentrism] Maurice Allais
- From: "philip madsen" <pma15027@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "geocentrism list" <geocentrism@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 12 Jul 2007 09:52:18 +1000
Theories of the aether http://www.mountainman.com.au/aetherqr.htm
The argument here http://www.mountainman.com.au/aether_7.htm
A scientific review here http://arxiv.org/ftp/gr-qc/papers/0408/0408023.pdf
An unexplained effect during solar eclipses casts doubt on General
Relativity"ASSUME nothing" is a good motto in science. Even the humble pendulum
may spring a surprise on you. In 1954 Maurice Allais, a French economist who
would go on to win, in 1988, the Nobel prize in his subject, decided to observe
and record the movements of a pendulum over a period of 30 days.
Coincidentally, one of his observations took place during a solar eclipse. When
the moon passed in front of the sun, the pendulum unexpectedly started moving a
bit faster than it should have done.
Since that first observation, the "Allais effect", as it is now called, has
confounded physicists. If the effect is real, it could indicate a hitherto
unperceived flaw in General Relativity-the current explanation of how gravity
works.
That would be a bombshell-and an ironic one, since it was observations taken
during a solar eclipse (of the way that light is bent when it passes close to
the sun) which established General Relativity in the first place. So attempts
to duplicate Dr Allais's observation are important. However, they have had
mixed success, leading sceptics to question whether there was anything to be
explained. Now Chris Duif, a researcher at the Delft University of Technology,
in the Netherlands, has reviewed the evidence. According to a paper he has just
posted on arXiv.org, an online publication archive, the effect is real,
unexplained, and could be linked to another anomaly involving a pair of
American spacecraft.
Three different types of instrument have been used to detect the Allais effect.
The first are conventional pendulums, such as the one Dr Allais used
originally. The second are torsion pendulums, which work by hanging a bar that
has weights at each end from a wire. As the wire twists back and forth, the bar
rotates in pendulum-like motion. The third are gravimeters, which are, in
essence, very precise scales. All of these instruments measure the acceleration
due to gravity at the Earth's surface, a quantity known as g. The Allais effect
is a small additional acceleration, so tiny that it would take an apple about a
day to fall from a tree branch if it were the only gravitational effect around.
Allez, Allais
Dr Duif has examined various conventional explanations for the Allais effect.
He finds the most obvious suggestion-that it is a mere measuring
error-unlikely, because similar results have been found by many different
groups, operating independently and, in at least one case, without knowledge of
Dr Allais's results.
He also discounts several explanations that rely on conventional physical
changes that might take place during an eclipse. One of these is that the
anomaly is caused by the seismic disturbance induced as crowds of sightseers
move into and out of a place where an eclipse is visible. That seems unlikely,
given that one of the experiments with a positive result was conducted in a
remote area of China while another that had a negative result took place in
Belgium, one of the most crowded parts of the planet. Dr Duif also considered
the possibility that, because the moon's shadow cools the air during an
eclipse, this cooler, and thus denser, air might exert a different
gravitational pull on the instruments. This change could, he reckons, affect a
gravimeter, but it cannot account for the results from the pendulums.
Dr Duif rules out a third explanation, too: that cooling of the Earth's crust
due to the eclipse shadow causes the ground to tilt slightly, and thus distorts
the results. He notes that although a detectable tilt is caused when the
temperature drops by a few degrees, that tilt is too small to explain the
anomalies and, in any case, it would lag roughly 30 minutes behind the shadow
(because it takes time for the ground to cool) while the experimental
measurements show a change in g instantaneously during an eclipse.
Although Dr Duif discounts each of the conventional explanations on its own, he
admits that they might, in combination, account for the Allais effect. But the
possibility also remains that General Relativity-Einstein's sacred child-is
wrong.
This suggestion would fit in with another odd phenomenon: the fact that the
Pioneer 10 and 11 space-probes, launched by NASA, America's space agency, in
the early 1970s, are receding from the sun slightly more slowly than they
should be.
According to a painstakingly detailed study by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
the part of NASA responsible for the craft, there is no conventional
explanation for this. There may, of course, be no relationship with the Allais
effect. But Dr Duif points out that the anomalous force felt by both Pioneer
probes (which are travelling in opposite directions from the sun) is about the
same size as that measured by some gravimeters during solar eclipses.
So what are the alternatives? One possibility (though it could not account for
the Pioneer observations) is known as Majorana shielding. This eponymous theory
is that large masses (such as the moon) partially block the gravitational force
from more distant objects (such as the sun). Another idea is "MOND", or
Modified Newtonian Dynamics, a theory put forward in 1983 by Moti Milgrom of
the Weizmann Institute in Israel. MOND suggests that at very low accelerations
gravity gets a bit stronger. An even stranger suggestion, made in 2002 by
Mikhail Gershteyn, then at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is that
the force of gravity is different in different directions. Most physicists do
not like that one at all. It requires that the conceptual "frames of reference"
against which movement, acceleration and so on are measured, are not uniform in
all directions. But it was a similarly radical idea-that there is no absolute
frame of reference in the universe, only local frames that can be measured
relative to one another, which put the "relativity" into relativity theory in
the first place...
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