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Concept
Allais effect
Summary
The Allais effect is the alleged anomalous behavior of pendulums or gravimeters which is sometimes purportedly observed during a solar eclipse. The effect was first reported as an anomalous precession of the plane of oscillation of a Foucault pendulum during the solar eclipse of June 30, 1954 by Maurice Allais, a French polymath who went on to win the Nobel Prize in Economics. Allais reported another observation of the effect during the solar eclipse of October 2, 1959 using the paraconical pendulum he invented. This study earned him the 1959 Galabert Prize of the French Astronautical Society and made him a laureate of the U.S. Gravity Research Foundation for his 1959 memoir on gravity. The veracity of the Allais effect remains controversial among the scientific community, as its testing has frequently met with inconsistent or ambiguous results over more than five decades of observation.
Maurice Allais emphasized the "dynamic character" of the effects he observed:
The observed effects are only seen when the pendulum is moving. They are not connected with the intensity of weight (gravimetry), but with the variation of weight (or of inertia) in the space swept by the pendulum. Actually, while the movement of the plane of oscillation of the pendulum is inexplicable by the theory of gravitation, the deviations from the vertical are explained perfectly by that theory. The deviations from the vertical [...] correspond to a static phenomenon, while my experiments correspond to a dynamic phenomenon.
Besides Allais' own experiments, related research about a possible effect of the Moon's shielding, absorption or bending of the Sun's gravitational field during a solar eclipse have been conducted by scientists around the world. Some observations have yielded positive results, seemingly confirming that minute but detectable variations in the expected behavior of devices dependent on gravity do indeed occur within the umbra of an eclipse, but others have failed to detect any noticeable effect.
Romanian physicist Gheorghe Jeverdan et al.
Official source
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