"Despite its omnipresence, gravity remains the least well tested of all the fundamental forces."
Task Group On Gravity Probe B, National Research Council, Washington, D.C. 1995 
On August 11, 1999, millions of people in the Northern Hemisphere will have one last chance in this millennium to marvel at a total solar eclipse. The path of totality will extend from the western Atlantic ocean, through Europe and Turkey, all the way across India into the Indian Ocean. At the instant of totality viewers situated along this path can glimpse at this Prophesized event -- "Bailey's Beads," diffraction bands, and, of course, the Sun's ephemeral corona.
But for some Scientist, it's not the visual fireworks that may make This August 11th, or May 5th 2000 one to remember. Instead, it's the prospect of probing a mystery called Gravity. David Noever and Ron Koczor of the Marshall Space Flight Center have recently been tasked with checking some hard-to-believe measurements reported 50 years ago by Nobel laureate Maurice Allais.
Now most people know what we have been taught about the Theory of Gravity, That the Apple falls to the ground from the tree. (think it was Neuton who calls this Gravity) Morticia's Theory (June 1999) goes on the principal that everything has a magnetic field. Like a magnet, Poles attract or repel an object. Everything has its own field, thus causing it to "fall" or be attracted to the earth, or repell "levitate" above the earth. "If you change the magnetic field, you can do Magical wonders in creating worlds"
Gravity causes our Tides in the oceans, Earthquakes from Molten material being pulled upwards from the earth.. Weather, Lightning and all the other mysteries can be answered with Morticia's Theory
In 1959, at the enthusiastic urging of rocket pioneer Werner von Braun, a peculiar set of physics experiments first appeared in English as a four-part series in the journal Aero/Space Engineering. The author, Maurice Allais, was a skilled physicist with an interest in the behavior of Foucault's Pendulum. From 1954 to 1960 he made careful observations of the motion of glass and metallic pendulums with the hope he would discover some connection between gravity and magnetism. Despite years of careful work, he never succeeded in finding a link between those disparate forces, but he did observe something extraordinary. During the total eclipses of June 30, 1954, and October 22, 1959, he detected "anomalies in the movement of the ... pendulum" during the time when the Earth, the Moon, and the Sun were aligned.
"A remarkable disturbance has been observed at the time of the total solar eclipse... it cannot be identified with periodic lunisolar effects resulting from the actual theory of gravitation."
Maurice Allais, 1959, from the abstract of his articles in Aero/Space Engineering
Allais’ solar eclipse results are hard to understand, but he was undoubtedly a meticulous scientist. His experiments were well-conceived and he repeated his measurements during two solar eclipses.
If something strange is happening to Foucault pendulums during solar eclipses, then it's a real mystery," says Noever. "Is it some gravitational effect, a peculiar manifestation of tides, or something else entirely? The idea that some unexplained aspect of gravity is at work seems nonsensical when you consider that it would seem to imply planets spinning out of their orbits over very long time scales (among other things). Also, why would the effect show up only during a solar eclipse? The Sun, the Moon, and the Earth are nearly aligned about once a month near the time of the new moon. A solar eclipse takes place when they are precisely aligned. If something is happening to gravity once a month, wouldn't we have noticed by now?"
The answer is YES. The Highest and Lowest Tides were just recorded when Venus and Mars and our moon have come into alignment. Earthquakes and other abnormalities were seen around our planet durring this same time period of June 1999. In Mexico the earthquake damaged cities, Alaska had building foundations that cracked. The Pacific Northwest had a Gas Pipeline Rupture.
The NASA/Marshall team plans to observe on August 11, 1999, Gravity filed with a high precision gravitometer located at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, AL. The gravitometer is a state-of-the-art gravity sensor tested as part of a Marshall project entitled "Ultra-high precision gravity measurements". Noever and Koczor are using this extraordinary device to carry out sensitive experiments in gravity physics at the Marshall Space Flight Center. They are also exploring the history of peer-reviewed gravity research and repeating or recasting experiments that would benefit from the high precision afforded by the gravitometer. Allais’ work falls in this group.
The instrument reports very small changes in the gravitational force acting on a mechanical spring-mass. Gravitational changes are expressed as the electrical force (measured as voltage) required to maintain the spring-mass system at a predetermined position (the null point). The modified LaCoste-Romberg gravitometer (Edcon, Inc. Denver, CO) measures relative gravity until calibrated against a reference. The instrument is routinely calibrated along the 10-station Rocky Mountain Calibration range established by NOAA, Edcon and the Colorado School of Mines. The calibration is validated by comparing the measure of absolute gravity in Huntsville Alabama with reference values from the USAF gravity disk.
"If Allais’ disturbance is real, and if it has something to do with gravity, then we will be able to measure it to 10 significant digits," says Noever.
Routinely, Noever and Koczor have recorded the gravitational disturbance of relatively small masses moving in a terrestrial laboratory--akin to a variation of one part in a billion in the local gravity field in response to the movements of a nearby automobile. These sensitivities in mass detection are traditionally considered appropriate subjects only for studying the kinds of enormous mass flows found in stars, not the subject for thoughtful laboratory research. If Allais’ pendulum experiments prove correct, then the Marshall experiments may reveal a disturbance as high as one-thousand on their measurement scale for the instrument--a relative siren amidst the otherwise quiet background of solar and lunar influence on Earth.
Noever and his colleagues also hope to enlist the aid of other scientists around the world with access to Foucault pendulums, to exactly reproduce Allais’ experiments on August 11. There are more than 60 Foucault pendulums located in museums and entrance halls, and thousands of amateur versions around the globe. Near the path of totality there are major Foucault pendulums at the Hall of Justice in Brussels, St Isaac's Cathedral in Leningrad, the Pantheon in Paris, and the UN Building in NY. Each one represents an opportunity to check Allais’ results. Above: The pushpin symbols show some of the major museum and educational locations having large, publicly viewable Foucault pendulum on display in the United States.
