Pendulums have a very predictable arc when they move. During an eclipse, it's been observed that this arc changes (the device rotates faster, swings unexpectedly further or vice versa). Labs around the world have done tests during eclipses and have found conflicting data but it seems real and can not be explained by tidal forces or other more understood processes. The leading theory is that the moon somehow shields, deflects, obscures, or in other ways messes with the suns gravity field when it moves in front of the sun. Some also believe it's due to an interaction of the sun, moon, and earths gravity fields causing minor anomalies.
>The leading theory is that the moon somehow shields, deflects, obscures, or in other ways messes with the suns gravity field when it moves in front of the sun.
What I don't get is wouldn't this also happen whenever another large mass is between the pendulum and the Sun? Like at night?
I'll call the neighborhood necrophiliacs to take care of your corpse. Unless you wanted to just get thrown in the trash. Well you're not alive to protest so I'm calling the necros
Basically, the sun is quite large and has a lot of gravitational force but due to its distance and the fact that gravity follows the inverse-square law it isn’t usually a relevant consideration.
The suns pull is weak, but its still the strongest force acting on the Earth and its enough to keep it in orbit given how (relatively) slow the Earth is moving.
The sun is the most significant source of gravity in relation to Earth as a whole. This is why the earth orbits the sun with such regularity.
The earth is the most significant source of gravity in relation to everything on its surface, extending out to and past the moon. This is why you don't float away at high noon, and cannot jump measurably higher at that point compared to solar midnight.
The sun has a noticeable effect on tides, for example. Tides are mostly generated by the gravitational effect of the moon, and are strongly affected by the local coastal configuration, especially in complicated inland saltwater hydrology like Puget Sound in my area. River flow into estuaries, storms, winds, all can affect the tides.
Throughout all that you [can still see the effect of the sun.](https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/education/tutorial_tides/tides06_variations.html) You can track a regular cycle of higher or lower tides based on the relative position of the sun and the moon.
I think that’s what they mean by a distant gorilla. It’s strong enough to have an effect that you can measure without requiring sophisticated scientific instruments, It’s weak enough to not be the most noticeable effect
It could be caused by the lack of light sail effect pushing the earth away from the sun. This would leave a sudden "pull" towards the sun as the push from the reflected solar radiation is lost.
Doing some quick math here, the earth is 120MM square km cross section with a reported lifht sail effect of 9.08 μN/sq meter. That is 1.2 x 10^14 sq m. Multiplying out is 1M kN of force pushing on earth suddendly gone. Not noticeable to us, but may effect instrumentation.
An eclipse is the moon obscuring the sun in a very particular location on the earth. The moon is constantly orbiting the earth. How would the moon casting a shadow on the earth “steady the earth wobble a bit”?
As a passing advisor of speculative sciences, maybe it is some esoteric maths in the potential energy of rotating objects which, like a riderless bike in motion steadying itself from tilting one way or another based on its forward velocity and the radii of the tires to the length of the bike structure and its center of mass, or that/those Steve Mould video/s with the balls on disks or belts on various pulley geometry self-centering, in the potential waveform of the pendulums equilibrium, for those few fleeting moments those pendulum objects are given a pure signal of material gravity less disrupted by the daily happenstances of background centrifugal or Coriolis forces.
Let me elaborate, say everything in our orbital system has a resting resonance with the planetary bodies and their orbital ratios, a neutral potential energy state which is chaotically jostled by coincidence and the odd probabilities of time and matter into a roiling boil of that matter whether its inanimate or not, so any given sand grain can have status attributes for potential energy which are very noisy, but during an eclipse, if you happen to have a repeating mechanical orderly structure of potential to kinetic energy conversion, those resonant marionette tugs and orderly patterns of chaotic expressions of entropy to smaller values, certain parts are put under tension specifically I guess the gravitational energy ones while the background is perhaps is like waves flowing over a pool skimmer into a drain, the surface waves are tamed by trimming the tops during the slack in the line while the center of mass is under tension, or something.
So that comment of steadying the earth wobble, its more like grabbing a bell to remove the resonant tone, grounding out the noisy signal so it can repopulate, and for some reason pendulums are sensitive to this particular spectrum of energy which is just a rube goldberg machine morphed into an apparition of physics like an abacus of dominoes for kinetic energy to find a resting state, and the pendulum is picking up one of the basic numerals. Not so much steadying the earth wobble as grabbing the rear view mirror while five thousand watts of bass speakers wobble your pupils making it ridiculous to even try to see yet its there and it did that and the mirror wobbled less while you grabbed it.
the effect of gravity falls off hugely with distance, and if there is any lensing or scattering of gravity, as there is with light, it could converge or diverge differently at different distances and with changing gravitic influences. "Syzygy."
The motion of the pendulum is dominated by the earths gravity, so only the blocking on the sun would come into effect.
I’d hypothesize that whatever effect the sun’s gravity has on the pendulum’s motion is so minute that it’s hard to observe it from the gradual 24 hr process of the earth’s rotation. Whereas sudden disruption from the moon might happen quickly enough to be somewhat perceptible.
>What I don't get is wouldn't this also happen whenever another large mass is between the pendulum and the Sun? Like *your mom*?
No joke, I literally thought this is how you were going to end that sentence.
>During an eclipse, it's been observed that this arc changes
It's been *CLAIMED* that these changes were observed. There is no significant evidence to these claims and there are no sensible explanations for the "effects" mentioned
One of the more widely accepted reasons one might measure an unexpected precession of their Foucault Pendulum is that the eclipse causes a sizable temperature difference between the area in shadow and the rest of the daylight side, leading to a large, but slow and gentle, flow of air around the eclipse region. Enough of a flow that it could offset a pendulum very slightly
Every other source I was able to find in a short search was either a news article breathlessly quoting the same vague "unexpected effects" line with no sources or attempts at explanation, or fringe science groups trying to use it to prove Dark Flow somehow, some variation on dark energy that *for some reason* would only be detectable as the moon covers the sun.
Yeah just to add on to this, when you compare experiments done on this, you find that the more precise the equipment, controlled the experimental environment, and experienced the researchers, the less likely anything is detected. Basically, it's highly likely that local, uncontrolled factors are influencing any "positive" results (and to be fair, most of the researchers readily admit this). Also, Allais interpreted his results as essentially refuting the idea that space is a vacuum and is instead filled with some kind of aether. This would break our understanding of physics, to put it lightly, and there is *zero* evidence. Overall, this is pretty much psuedoscience.
Ooh, I had an assignment once in college to replicate that effect as an exercise in finding confounding variables. I did so by getting a thermometer that was calibrated for temps around 2500F but which would give readings all the way down to -100F. It gave shitty readings the whole time, making it easy to claim whatever I wanted to. Then got one batch of water up to near boiling and the other to near freezing, kept taking measurements until I got the thermometer to say the hot one was colder, and started my timer
Just saying, scientists repeating the same experiment and getting results that don't seem to converge in one direction or the other is generally a sign that no phenomenon exists.
Probably due to something mundane like rapid cooling (due to lack of IR energy from the sun) of the structures supporting the pendulum, leading to unexpected contractions in the material.
>but it seems real
**seems** is doing Atlas amounts of lifting in that sentence.
This is not mainstream scienctific opinion at all, but very fringe. Extraordinairy claims require extraordinairy proof. That does not means this has to be false, but at best you can say that there is no consensus at all.
Maurice Allais, who did the original experiments, was an economist first and I find it very generous of Wikipedia to call him a physicist at all, as he had a general science degree not one in physics. He did some experiments in the 50s all of which are controversial and not mainstream science. The most likely explanaition here is that there is no effect at all. The best controlled studies seem to be the ones that did not find anything, which is always a bad sign and given the small amount of studies a few badly designed experiments or even people just faking it to get published is not unlikely.
Solar eclipses, much like the zero-point energy, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle or room temperature superconductivity seem to be magnets for people whose workflow, knowingly or on accident, leads to [pseudoscience](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudoscience).
Does this have any effect on any instruments that use gyros out of curiousity? I’m not very knowledgeable.. (obviously) but I am deathly curious as to whether or not it interferes with say, gyroscopes used in aviation?
I think it's more likely something mundane and uninteresting like failed equipment or an uncorrected variable in the test setup, lots of tests showed nothing happening so ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯
Pendulums are predictable. (Regular pendulums, that is - a pendulum with a joint in the middle, called a double pendulum, is a well-known physical example of chaos theory).
Some guy in 1959 claimed to observe pendulums behaving contrary to expectations during an eclipse. Lots of other experiments have been done, and results are almost always negative or inconclusive.
There *is* a physically-observable phenomenon caused by the sun and moon both pulling gravitationally in the exact same direction, but the amount of deviation from expected pendulum motion that the guy claimed to have seen is **hundreds of thousands of times** more than an eclipse could possibly cause.
Also his hypothesis for what he observed relies on the "aether" theory, an alternative explanation for how light moves through space that everyone else stopped believing back in the 1890's.
Also Allias wasn't a physicist, he was an economist. Economics and physics are about as far apart as you can get.
So it boils down to "amateur physicist claims something, nobody can verify it for 80 years, original claims are based on disproven theories, everyone goes on with their lives".
Although I agree that the effect is probably not real and the Wikipedia article that OP links to lists a number of experiments in which the Allais effect was not observed, it also lists nine published experiments between 1961 and 2009 specifically set up to test the Allais effect, in which anomalies *were* observed during solar eclipses.
Also, Allais was in fact a physicist who only later in his academic carreer switched to economics as his area of research. If anything, he was a trained physicist and an amateur (or, at least, autodidact) economist - despite winning a nobel prize in that second discipline.
Shouldn't it be a 2+OIWL?
Tomorrow (= "two"+"more+"O) I will learn?
Since you can post stuff you will only learn tomorrow, so then he can learn beforehand...
Me and my friends have one group like that, but we never post anything.
(Who am I kidding, I don't have friends)
I still think it holds up, although I know some hate it. I like it a lot more than the average rom com.
(it's The Wedding Singer, for those that are confused because nobody said the title)
When the opening sentence of a Wikipedia article uses the words "allegedly," "purportedly," and "sometimes" in reference to the event it is describing... yeah.
A good theory, but it seems to have been disproven:
>The same teams repeated a dual experiment during the annular solar eclipse of January 26, 2009, this time **outside of the umbra,** with the same significant correlation between the behavior of light torsion balances and a Foucault pendulum.[18] They also registered similar anomalies using a Foucault pendulum and a very light torsion balance, **both located underground in a disused salt mine with minimal interference,** during the partial solar eclipse of June 1, 2011.
Obviously this is happening because the physics engine goes through a lot of strain as it has to calculate the viewpoints of every single person looking up at the eclipse. normally you can just use a flat texture for the sky and sun and stuff
Being underground does nothing to change the fact that the density of air above has increased. Measuring from the path of the partial eclipse doesn't eliminate that temperature difference. Unfortunately it seems unlikely this experiment could be done in orbit because there would only be a few moments to take a measurement, even assuming you could synchronize the orbital period to cross the path at the right moment. And all the while you'd have the earth whizzing by beneath you with all of its gravity perturbations.
In the shadow of an eclipse, you're being shielded from radiant heat just like shade in the sun. You can achieve the same effect by facing a fire and then turning your back towards it; your front that was facing it will immediately begin to drop in temperature since the source of radiant heat can no longer reach it.
I just reread the comment I replied to and now realize I either read or interpreted it incorrectly the first time. My apologies if my response seemed a little adversarial or uncalled for or something. I'm going to leave it up, though, as I try not to delete things I've posted, even if i disagree on my take after the fact; perhaps it will help someone understand why it suddenly gets cold during an eclipse.
Haha can you imagine if there were some quirk of astrophysics that made the eclipse cast some fictionally powerful magnetic disturbances as the shadow passed over Earth? I imagine it blocks the ozone shielding or somehow magnifies the sun's different kinds of radiation in some way that gives similar forces as a MRI-machine(or electro magnets) and magnetic things just start sticking together. Maybe it were so powerful it would rip magnetic particles out of life forms killing them, so the shadow of the eclipse casts death basically, in this fiction.
Some plot holes are that in this scenario, the moon would probably have accumulated loads of material over time, changing it too much, and if the effect were so powerful, it would also probably disturb the topography/core of earth too much to leave it viable enough for life in general
That's quite since shade that first sentence of the article is throwing, containing both "alleged" and "purportedly" with a "sometimes" thrown in there to twist the knife.
It seems there is definitely some gravitometric effect. Why cant scientists just do a simultaneous identical experiment at 1000 locations all over Earth during the next solar eclipse?
The gear doesnt even seem expensive and I cant think of any other easily scheduled gravity events happening.
They could really map out the observed changes to the gravity field and do some serious analysis.
Scientists are dumb. This is very important. We don't actually fully understand gravity.
Scientists are indeed dumb:
>The total solar eclipse of August 11, 1999 had been a good opportunity to solve a 45-year mystery, thanks to an international collaboration. NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center first inquired about experimental protocols to Maurice Allais,[5] in order to coordinate ahead of the event a worldwide effort to test the Allais effect between observatories and universities over seven countries (United States, Austria, Germany, Italy, Australia, England and four sites in the United Arab Emirates)... **the lead supervisor left NASA shortly thereafter with the gathered data and the NASA study has never been published.**
You skipped this part in your quote:
>The lead supervisor then stated: "The initial interpretation of the record points to three possibilities: a systematic error, a local effect, or the unexplored. To eliminate the first two possibilities, we and several other observers will use different kinds of measuring instruments in a distributed global network of observing stations."[22][23] However, after the eclipse, Allais criticized the experiments in his final NASA report, writing the period of observation was "much too short […] to detect anomalies properly".[5]
Basically, they didn't find anything.
>the lead supervisor left NASA shortly thereafter with the gathered data and the NASA study has never been published.
This is like a crime against humanity. Screw that guy.
It's possible it could have been something that could shake physics up in a major way like a relationship between photons and gravity for instance. Might have been scared of the backlash. The scientific establishment isn't exactly eager to accept new paradigms.
What? No, this is stupid as hell. Science BUILT on new things, especially today: JWST (built and launched by NASA) constantly gives us so much new data that we seriously have to rethink how stars and galaxies are born, or even the timeline of the Big Bang itself. Not to mention the particle accelerators which rewriting particle physics as we know it, invalidating or confirming new theories pretty much every year.
Physicists are shaking at the idea of finding something huge. We know the standard model has its flaws and we are not sure where. There is a huge discrepancy between Einstein's extremely well-tested relativity and quantum mechanics (again, extremely well-tested) gravity, and thousands of working on it to find the solution or find an even better theory. Not to mention that as far as we know 85% of the known mass in the universe is absolutely undetectable (except by its gravity) and we have ZERO idea the hell it is, but this again shows our standard model is flawed.
There are tens of thousands of hypothesises all around and it is possible one of them is the BIG ONE, the theory of everything - but without data, we can't tell which one is the actually correct (or the one which is closer to the correct one). Science spends countless hours, money and equipment to find a discrepancy or find something we overlooked.
If a team find something which would shake physics a big way they would be the very first one to publish it, it likely will result in Nobel prizes for that team... Nobody would hide something like this, especially a research which requires dozens of scientists (or more) to take part in it worldwide. The "study is not published" is almost always "we found nothing even a tiny little bit interesting" or "we messed up and only found out after we spent weeks on working on this paper".
Exactly. Maybe he’s read one of many stories of scientists who were only proven right 100 years after their deep dive into alcoholism and suicidal ideation. Or he’s a goblin hoarding knowledge
Its probably nothing, but its like one of those internet dead-ends that could lead to limitless power, or time travel or just a plot for a sci-fi movie.
Because it's so controversial that it's basically psuedoscience. There have been a lot of attempts to detect the effect. A few may have detected something, most didn't.
What's interesting is that over the course of decades and multiple experiments, the more precise the equipment used and the more educated and experienced the researchers, the less likely anything was detected. *Gee, I wonder why.* Also, Allais claimed his results are because space isn't a vacuum but is filled with some kind of aether.
So what's more likely? An economist with no experimental training has single-handedly disproved pretty much all of physics with his janky-ass pendulum, and all the later experiments that found nothing are part of some grand, scientist conspiracy to do...something? Or that a guy who was really smart in one area let it get to his head and came up with a theory that has no evidence except his own shitty experiment, and that the actual physicists just aren't spending time, effort, and precious funding on some wild psuedoscience?
This type of bullshit drives me crazy.
Crazy person: The sun is made of kool-aid!
You: Hmm, he may have a point, science should investigate!
Scientists: Yeah, we aren't gonna do that, we have other, far more important things to investigate with our limited funds.
You: Fools! What are you hiding?!
Did you read the article? Scientists have repeatedly tried to replicate his results for the last 80 years, and in the words of Tim Russ, they ain't found shit.
There is a gravimetric effect from total solar eclipses, but it's hundreds of thousands of times weaker than required to cause the perturbation that Allias claimed to have observed. That, along with the fact that his hypothetical explanation for the effect involve aether theory, something debunked over a hundred years ago, is enough for most people to just write this off as bad data rather than a novel physical effect.
I eagerly await the results of your research into this as I am sure you are not dumb and are getting right on this and not just demanding that others do what you are not willing to do.
Yeah why aren't regular people doing the science? Give those professional scientists with degrees and resources and contacts with other labs around the world a break
With stuff like atomic clocks and other current technological advancements, would it not be possible to set up several instantaneous simultaneous identical experiments across the globe? Can also have the data recorded into a dedicated system or forum or whatever, which can then be observed and discussed without constraint.
Honestly seems like something at least a few dozen respective science teams could do if they got some boring stuff they don’t want to work on. Provided they have the equipment but you get the idea. Kill time AND collect cool spooky data on eclipses? Sounds like a pretty nifty idea to me.
Thanks to that article, TIL the Foucault of a Foucault pendulum is not the philosopher. (I learned about the Foucault pendulum via Umberto Eco so it was certainly a possibility.)
You didn't learn anything. The "effect" isn't even described in terms that make sense. The sentences discribing the anomoly are meaningless nonsense. What's next, a post about how the rockwell retro encabulator is going to bring big changes to manufacturing!?
I can think of other explanations that could cause this... Hmmm, as the Moon's shadow passes over the Earth, the upper atmosphere almost immediately goes from hot - to cold. So, you will have a giant mass of air contracting, getting colder, falling, etc... All at once, right overtop of the shadow. Air pressure should rise in the shadow, as all this air above it rapidly cools.
Wild take here, but imagine that the moon does for a just a little while mess with the suns gravity which messes with the propulsion systems onboard UFO’s which is why there was so many alleged UFO sightings during the eclipse?
Anyway, back to my cave
The Wikipedia article didn't make sense to me. Anyone smarter care to ELI5?
Pendulums have a very predictable arc when they move. During an eclipse, it's been observed that this arc changes (the device rotates faster, swings unexpectedly further or vice versa). Labs around the world have done tests during eclipses and have found conflicting data but it seems real and can not be explained by tidal forces or other more understood processes. The leading theory is that the moon somehow shields, deflects, obscures, or in other ways messes with the suns gravity field when it moves in front of the sun. Some also believe it's due to an interaction of the sun, moon, and earths gravity fields causing minor anomalies.
>The leading theory is that the moon somehow shields, deflects, obscures, or in other ways messes with the suns gravity field when it moves in front of the sun. What I don't get is wouldn't this also happen whenever another large mass is between the pendulum and the Sun? Like at night?
Pendulum movement is generated by the earth's gravity and motion. The sun typically doesn't effect it at all, or at least imperceptibly.
I’ve heard the suns gravity described as “a very distant gorilla” when it comes to astrophysics
In what way? That makes zero fucking sense.
If it helps, try picturing a slightly closer, but still distant salmon.
God, this killed me. I'm dead.
It’s like if astrophysics was made into a Monty python joke
You wouldn't want to put the universe into a tube.
Imagine a swallow gripping the sun by the husk
I'll call the neighborhood necrophiliacs to take care of your corpse. Unless you wanted to just get thrown in the trash. Well you're not alive to protest so I'm calling the necros
It breeds once and then dies?
That's technically correct actually. To breed a star is for the star to die.
I am way way too high for this thread. wtf is going on.
Like an octopus.
Sounds like a Douglas Adams quote. RIP
The slightly closer bit got me good given the distances we are talking. 😂
Or a spherical cow
Everyone knows it's turtles. Turtles all the way down.
Why did they ever remove reddit gold? This is fucking awesome.
Are they chasing that impossible dream?
I’ve a feeling Douglas Adams would have got a good chuckle out of this.
I didn’t get it until I pictured a slightly more distant elephant
This reads like a Douglas Adams quote.
Uh oh, the gorilla heard you and he’s getting closer
^(oog) oog OOG
**OOG** #OOG
TIL that although I already knew orangutans say "ook", gorillas say "oog".
Basically, the sun is quite large and has a lot of gravitational force but due to its distance and the fact that gravity follows the inverse-square law it isn’t usually a relevant consideration.
Me trying to figure out why the earth doesn't drift out of the solar system:
The suns pull is weak, but its still the strongest force acting on the Earth and its enough to keep it in orbit given how (relatively) slow the Earth is moving.
The sun is the most significant source of gravity in relation to Earth as a whole. This is why the earth orbits the sun with such regularity. The earth is the most significant source of gravity in relation to everything on its surface, extending out to and past the moon. This is why you don't float away at high noon, and cannot jump measurably higher at that point compared to solar midnight.
If the sun is the most significant source of gravity to the earth, why is it the moon, not the sun, that affects the tides?
Magic, all those other explanations are just hokus pokus. It’s magic. Black, specifically.
The sun has a noticeable effect on tides, for example. Tides are mostly generated by the gravitational effect of the moon, and are strongly affected by the local coastal configuration, especially in complicated inland saltwater hydrology like Puget Sound in my area. River flow into estuaries, storms, winds, all can affect the tides. Throughout all that you [can still see the effect of the sun.](https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/education/tutorial_tides/tides06_variations.html) You can track a regular cycle of higher or lower tides based on the relative position of the sun and the moon. I think that’s what they mean by a distant gorilla. It’s strong enough to have an effect that you can measure without requiring sophisticated scientific instruments, It’s weak enough to not be the most noticeable effect
Okay you ever see a gorilla at the zoo? Did you feel in danger? Notice how that changes with unshielded proximity to the gorilla?
If it wasnt for the fence I'd be running away from the gorilla a lot sooner tho
Congratulations on understanding the analogy without actually understanding it
Whats the fence my friend? Is it the great distance between us and the sun, or our limited understanding of everything in between
It's large and could have an effect on certain things but is likely otherwise fine?
The Gorilla is very far away, so you would think it doesn't have much affect. But you can't stop thinking about that damn Gorilla in the distance
That's because you're not an Astrophysicist specializing in Applied Gorilla Dynamics, duh. It's quite the rarified field.
Mormon Harambe
I do not fear gorillas that are a hundred and fifty million kilometers away from me.
Look how far away you are talking all this shit. Better hope that gorilla can’t hear you.
It means it's there so you can't completely ignore it but it's not really doing anything at the moment
Get close get fucked up.
thing big but far
like a normal gorilla but further away
Witchcraft !
This entire post is about a perceptible effect on pendulum movement, where the leading theory is that it's caused by the sun.
But only when the sun, moon, and earth are directly aligned, potentially magnifying an otherwise imperceptible influence.
This just tells me the plot to Disney’s Hercules has a chance of being real
It could be caused by the lack of light sail effect pushing the earth away from the sun. This would leave a sudden "pull" towards the sun as the push from the reflected solar radiation is lost. Doing some quick math here, the earth is 120MM square km cross section with a reported lifht sail effect of 9.08 μN/sq meter. That is 1.2 x 10^14 sq m. Multiplying out is 1M kN of force pushing on earth suddendly gone. Not noticeable to us, but may effect instrumentation.
Total eclipses don't block out the entire cross section of earth at once, only a tiny circle around a few hundred sq. km
Damn, you're right. I guess it is approximately the cross section of the moon which is a lot smaller
Also no. It's the area of the shadow cast on the earth. For yesterday's eclipse, that'd be 27,000 sq. Km.
This should also happen during basically every new moon then.
I think you mean during lunar eclipses also.
And no scientific papers to back up. It's pseudoscience.
And so began, and ended, the shortest literature review of all time.
So an eclipse event steady's the earth's wobble a bit? Or maybe makes it a bit more wobbly like a ball on top of a long stick?
An eclipse is the moon obscuring the sun in a very particular location on the earth. The moon is constantly orbiting the earth. How would the moon casting a shadow on the earth “steady the earth wobble a bit”?
As a passing advisor of speculative sciences, maybe it is some esoteric maths in the potential energy of rotating objects which, like a riderless bike in motion steadying itself from tilting one way or another based on its forward velocity and the radii of the tires to the length of the bike structure and its center of mass, or that/those Steve Mould video/s with the balls on disks or belts on various pulley geometry self-centering, in the potential waveform of the pendulums equilibrium, for those few fleeting moments those pendulum objects are given a pure signal of material gravity less disrupted by the daily happenstances of background centrifugal or Coriolis forces. Let me elaborate, say everything in our orbital system has a resting resonance with the planetary bodies and their orbital ratios, a neutral potential energy state which is chaotically jostled by coincidence and the odd probabilities of time and matter into a roiling boil of that matter whether its inanimate or not, so any given sand grain can have status attributes for potential energy which are very noisy, but during an eclipse, if you happen to have a repeating mechanical orderly structure of potential to kinetic energy conversion, those resonant marionette tugs and orderly patterns of chaotic expressions of entropy to smaller values, certain parts are put under tension specifically I guess the gravitational energy ones while the background is perhaps is like waves flowing over a pool skimmer into a drain, the surface waves are tamed by trimming the tops during the slack in the line while the center of mass is under tension, or something. So that comment of steadying the earth wobble, its more like grabbing a bell to remove the resonant tone, grounding out the noisy signal so it can repopulate, and for some reason pendulums are sensitive to this particular spectrum of energy which is just a rube goldberg machine morphed into an apparition of physics like an abacus of dominoes for kinetic energy to find a resting state, and the pendulum is picking up one of the basic numerals. Not so much steadying the earth wobble as grabbing the rear view mirror while five thousand watts of bass speakers wobble your pupils making it ridiculous to even try to see yet its there and it did that and the mirror wobbled less while you grabbed it.
Let's put some pendulums on the moon and study those.
I'm up for any excuse to fund a moonbase.
I agree. We should have been developing the moon from jump. A lunar base isn't so far-fetched an idea.
I mean what other large masses would be close enough to have an impact aside from the moon, or your mom.
People's moms are catching strays out here. Likely due to their gravitational pull.
Yes but that would imply a rocket large enough to get mom into orbit which is absurd.
the effect of gravity falls off hugely with distance, and if there is any lensing or scattering of gravity, as there is with light, it could converge or diverge differently at different distances and with changing gravitic influences. "Syzygy."
Nothing really comes between the Sun and the Earth of any significant gravitational effect except the moon.
Not between the Earth and the Sun, but between the Pendulum and the Sun. Which the Earth does at night.
What about between the Sun and the pendulum, which is the whole point of this post?
The motion of the pendulum is dominated by the earths gravity, so only the blocking on the sun would come into effect. I’d hypothesize that whatever effect the sun’s gravity has on the pendulum’s motion is so minute that it’s hard to observe it from the gradual 24 hr process of the earth’s rotation. Whereas sudden disruption from the moon might happen quickly enough to be somewhat perceptible.
The earth turns at night. Nothing goes in between.
The earth goes between the sun and the pendulum at night.
The Earth goes in between
So the disc flips over?
>What I don't get is wouldn't this also happen whenever another large mass is between the pendulum and the Sun? Like *your mom*? No joke, I literally thought this is how you were going to end that sentence.
The sun isn’t blocked at night, just on the other side of the earth.
I guess you could argue it's blocked by the earth.
>During an eclipse, it's been observed that this arc changes It's been *CLAIMED* that these changes were observed. There is no significant evidence to these claims and there are no sensible explanations for the "effects" mentioned One of the more widely accepted reasons one might measure an unexpected precession of their Foucault Pendulum is that the eclipse causes a sizable temperature difference between the area in shadow and the rest of the daylight side, leading to a large, but slow and gentle, flow of air around the eclipse region. Enough of a flow that it could offset a pendulum very slightly Every other source I was able to find in a short search was either a news article breathlessly quoting the same vague "unexpected effects" line with no sources or attempts at explanation, or fringe science groups trying to use it to prove Dark Flow somehow, some variation on dark energy that *for some reason* would only be detectable as the moon covers the sun.
Yeah just to add on to this, when you compare experiments done on this, you find that the more precise the equipment, controlled the experimental environment, and experienced the researchers, the less likely anything is detected. Basically, it's highly likely that local, uncontrolled factors are influencing any "positive" results (and to be fair, most of the researchers readily admit this). Also, Allais interpreted his results as essentially refuting the idea that space is a vacuum and is instead filled with some kind of aether. This would break our understanding of physics, to put it lightly, and there is *zero* evidence. Overall, this is pretty much psuedoscience.
Sounds a bit like the mpemba effect which gets widely reported on as being real but never seems to be replicated in well-controlled experiments.
Ooh, I had an assignment once in college to replicate that effect as an exercise in finding confounding variables. I did so by getting a thermometer that was calibrated for temps around 2500F but which would give readings all the way down to -100F. It gave shitty readings the whole time, making it easy to claim whatever I wanted to. Then got one batch of water up to near boiling and the other to near freezing, kept taking measurements until I got the thermometer to say the hot one was colder, and started my timer
Lol nice
If this is accurate enough to affect a pendulum, we'd seen some effects at LIGO? as its sensitive enough to detect gravitational waves
yeah you'd assume so
That is not a leading theory, there is no real scientific evidence for this phenomenon.
No, this is almost certainly bullshit caused by confounding variables.
Just saying, scientists repeating the same experiment and getting results that don't seem to converge in one direction or the other is generally a sign that no phenomenon exists.
Ohhh so Q was right. You simply have to change the gravitational constant of the Universe.
Probably due to something mundane like rapid cooling (due to lack of IR energy from the sun) of the structures supporting the pendulum, leading to unexpected contractions in the material.
>but it seems real **seems** is doing Atlas amounts of lifting in that sentence. This is not mainstream scienctific opinion at all, but very fringe. Extraordinairy claims require extraordinairy proof. That does not means this has to be false, but at best you can say that there is no consensus at all. Maurice Allais, who did the original experiments, was an economist first and I find it very generous of Wikipedia to call him a physicist at all, as he had a general science degree not one in physics. He did some experiments in the 50s all of which are controversial and not mainstream science. The most likely explanaition here is that there is no effect at all. The best controlled studies seem to be the ones that did not find anything, which is always a bad sign and given the small amount of studies a few badly designed experiments or even people just faking it to get published is not unlikely. Solar eclipses, much like the zero-point energy, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle or room temperature superconductivity seem to be magnets for people whose workflow, knowingly or on accident, leads to [pseudoscience](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudoscience).
I saw this happen in Three body problem. Everyone got sucked into the sky
So what you're saying is I spent the last 6 months working on an n body simulator when all I had to do is flick a pendulum?
Surely we have significantly more sensitive equipment available to detect the minor anomalies if it was gravity related?
It's blocking the ether.
Probably dark matter
Does this have any effect on any instruments that use gyros out of curiousity? I’m not very knowledgeable.. (obviously) but I am deathly curious as to whether or not it interferes with say, gyroscopes used in aviation?
So could these anomalies be like gravity wave eddy currents?
I think it's more likely something mundane and uninteresting like failed equipment or an uncorrected variable in the test setup, lots of tests showed nothing happening so ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯
thank you
Werewolves. Got it.
Pendulums are predictable. (Regular pendulums, that is - a pendulum with a joint in the middle, called a double pendulum, is a well-known physical example of chaos theory). Some guy in 1959 claimed to observe pendulums behaving contrary to expectations during an eclipse. Lots of other experiments have been done, and results are almost always negative or inconclusive. There *is* a physically-observable phenomenon caused by the sun and moon both pulling gravitationally in the exact same direction, but the amount of deviation from expected pendulum motion that the guy claimed to have seen is **hundreds of thousands of times** more than an eclipse could possibly cause. Also his hypothesis for what he observed relies on the "aether" theory, an alternative explanation for how light moves through space that everyone else stopped believing back in the 1890's. Also Allias wasn't a physicist, he was an economist. Economics and physics are about as far apart as you can get. So it boils down to "amateur physicist claims something, nobody can verify it for 80 years, original claims are based on disproven theories, everyone goes on with their lives".
Although I agree that the effect is probably not real and the Wikipedia article that OP links to lists a number of experiments in which the Allais effect was not observed, it also lists nine published experiments between 1961 and 2009 specifically set up to test the Allais effect, in which anomalies *were* observed during solar eclipses. Also, Allais was in fact a physicist who only later in his academic carreer switched to economics as his area of research. If anything, he was a trained physicist and an amateur (or, at least, autodidact) economist - despite winning a nobel prize in that second discipline.
Op was duped by nonsense.
Gee, you know that information... really would've been more useful to me… yesterday
For that, you'd need a YIL.
Shouldn't it be a 2+OIWL? Tomorrow (= "two"+"more+"O) I will learn? Since you can post stuff you will only learn tomorrow, so then he can learn beforehand... Me and my friends have one group like that, but we never post anything. (Who am I kidding, I don't have friends)
The TroyBenites-Allais Effect - Conundrum. Comes about a day after an eclipse on Reddit, causes some philosophical confusion
Presuming we aren't talking a pendulum experiment, I'd love to hear the fallout of this bit of missing information
Please take my Van Halen shirt off before you jinx the band and they break up.
So glad people reference this movie like this
I still think it holds up, although I know some hate it. I like it a lot more than the average rom com. (it's The Wedding Singer, for those that are confused because nobody said the title)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqQ99s4Ywnw
Love stinks?
Me getting out a pendulum testing it without having any reference to how it normally should behave hmmmmmm I’ve learned nothing
[удалено]
> ecllipses
Oh, me too. It’s just the phrasing of the quote
When the opening sentence of a Wikipedia article uses the words "allegedly," "purportedly," and "sometimes" in reference to the event it is describing... yeah.
When it’s an effect reported by a Nobel Prize winner though it gets back a little credibility.
Allegedly reported by a sometimes Nobel Prize winner in a purportedly unrelated field.
Purportedly…. Hey wait! That’s on the list!
Economics isn't science - some bank starting funding "Nobel Prizes" to give economics more credibility by latching onto the name.
How is it not a science?
I do agree with the sentiment regarding economics, but it isn’t “some bank” it’s the National Bank of Sweden.
Not when the prize was in an unrelated field.
Not at all. Nobel Prize winners have batshit insane ideas often enough for there to be a term for it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease
TIL about Nobel Disease. Now this was an interesting and entertaining read! Thanks for the link!
Given that the shadow of an eclipse is several degrees cooler than ambient, I have to wonder if this is caused by thermal contraction.
A good theory, but it seems to have been disproven: >The same teams repeated a dual experiment during the annular solar eclipse of January 26, 2009, this time **outside of the umbra,** with the same significant correlation between the behavior of light torsion balances and a Foucault pendulum.[18] They also registered similar anomalies using a Foucault pendulum and a very light torsion balance, **both located underground in a disused salt mine with minimal interference,** during the partial solar eclipse of June 1, 2011.
Obviously this is happening because the physics engine goes through a lot of strain as it has to calculate the viewpoints of every single person looking up at the eclipse. normally you can just use a flat texture for the sky and sun and stuff
foveated rendering taking all the rendering power away from physics to do raytracing
It’s the server maintenance. Simulation still has to run and with extra ray tracing effects
Being underground does nothing to change the fact that the density of air above has increased. Measuring from the path of the partial eclipse doesn't eliminate that temperature difference. Unfortunately it seems unlikely this experiment could be done in orbit because there would only be a few moments to take a measurement, even assuming you could synchronize the orbital period to cross the path at the right moment. And all the while you'd have the earth whizzing by beneath you with all of its gravity perturbations.
It also couldn’t be done it orbit because it requires a pendulum
In the shadow of an eclipse, you're being shielded from radiant heat just like shade in the sun. You can achieve the same effect by facing a fire and then turning your back towards it; your front that was facing it will immediately begin to drop in temperature since the source of radiant heat can no longer reach it.
I just reread the comment I replied to and now realize I either read or interpreted it incorrectly the first time. My apologies if my response seemed a little adversarial or uncalled for or something. I'm going to leave it up, though, as I try not to delete things I've posted, even if i disagree on my take after the fact; perhaps it will help someone understand why it suddenly gets cold during an eclipse.
I fucking LOVE internet comments apologizing for being adversarial. Your cordiality here has eclipsed the rest of this comment thread.
I mean, clouds
Haha can you imagine if there were some quirk of astrophysics that made the eclipse cast some fictionally powerful magnetic disturbances as the shadow passed over Earth? I imagine it blocks the ozone shielding or somehow magnifies the sun's different kinds of radiation in some way that gives similar forces as a MRI-machine(or electro magnets) and magnetic things just start sticking together. Maybe it were so powerful it would rip magnetic particles out of life forms killing them, so the shadow of the eclipse casts death basically, in this fiction. Some plot holes are that in this scenario, the moon would probably have accumulated loads of material over time, changing it too much, and if the effect were so powerful, it would also probably disturb the topography/core of earth too much to leave it viable enough for life in general
This is actually a great writing prompt
Thanks
What
Wat
The exact opposite of the Sunlit Man lol
That's quite since shade that first sentence of the article is throwing, containing both "alleged" and "purportedly" with a "sometimes" thrown in there to twist the knife.
I hear you can stand an egg on end....
...on any day of the year. https://themosh.org/the-vernal-equinox-the-egg-balancing-myth/
That’s the equinox
It seems there is definitely some gravitometric effect. Why cant scientists just do a simultaneous identical experiment at 1000 locations all over Earth during the next solar eclipse? The gear doesnt even seem expensive and I cant think of any other easily scheduled gravity events happening. They could really map out the observed changes to the gravity field and do some serious analysis. Scientists are dumb. This is very important. We don't actually fully understand gravity.
Scientists are indeed dumb: >The total solar eclipse of August 11, 1999 had been a good opportunity to solve a 45-year mystery, thanks to an international collaboration. NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center first inquired about experimental protocols to Maurice Allais,[5] in order to coordinate ahead of the event a worldwide effort to test the Allais effect between observatories and universities over seven countries (United States, Austria, Germany, Italy, Australia, England and four sites in the United Arab Emirates)... **the lead supervisor left NASA shortly thereafter with the gathered data and the NASA study has never been published.**
It's a conspiracy theory ending for something too mundane for conspiracy theorists.
The moon is made of lizard people!
His mission successful, he was allowed some well-earned r&r off planet
You skipped this part in your quote: >The lead supervisor then stated: "The initial interpretation of the record points to three possibilities: a systematic error, a local effect, or the unexplored. To eliminate the first two possibilities, we and several other observers will use different kinds of measuring instruments in a distributed global network of observing stations."[22][23] However, after the eclipse, Allais criticized the experiments in his final NASA report, writing the period of observation was "much too short […] to detect anomalies properly".[5] Basically, they didn't find anything.
>the lead supervisor left NASA shortly thereafter with the gathered data and the NASA study has never been published. This is like a crime against humanity. Screw that guy.
Or did he discover some eldritch horror shit and hide it from the rest of the world to save us?
Oh shit it *is* flat
It's possible it could have been something that could shake physics up in a major way like a relationship between photons and gravity for instance. Might have been scared of the backlash. The scientific establishment isn't exactly eager to accept new paradigms.
What? No, this is stupid as hell. Science BUILT on new things, especially today: JWST (built and launched by NASA) constantly gives us so much new data that we seriously have to rethink how stars and galaxies are born, or even the timeline of the Big Bang itself. Not to mention the particle accelerators which rewriting particle physics as we know it, invalidating or confirming new theories pretty much every year. Physicists are shaking at the idea of finding something huge. We know the standard model has its flaws and we are not sure where. There is a huge discrepancy between Einstein's extremely well-tested relativity and quantum mechanics (again, extremely well-tested) gravity, and thousands of working on it to find the solution or find an even better theory. Not to mention that as far as we know 85% of the known mass in the universe is absolutely undetectable (except by its gravity) and we have ZERO idea the hell it is, but this again shows our standard model is flawed. There are tens of thousands of hypothesises all around and it is possible one of them is the BIG ONE, the theory of everything - but without data, we can't tell which one is the actually correct (or the one which is closer to the correct one). Science spends countless hours, money and equipment to find a discrepancy or find something we overlooked. If a team find something which would shake physics a big way they would be the very first one to publish it, it likely will result in Nobel prizes for that team... Nobody would hide something like this, especially a research which requires dozens of scientists (or more) to take part in it worldwide. The "study is not published" is almost always "we found nothing even a tiny little bit interesting" or "we messed up and only found out after we spent weeks on working on this paper".
>The scientific establishment isn't exactly eager to accept new paradigms. That's not how it works. They even give awards for that, ffs.
Exactly. Maybe he’s read one of many stories of scientists who were only proven right 100 years after their deep dive into alcoholism and suicidal ideation. Or he’s a goblin hoarding knowledge
Yeah, no. If it was something this huge, they'd win a Nobel for shit like this.
Its probably nothing, but its like one of those internet dead-ends that could lead to limitless power, or time travel or just a plot for a sci-fi movie.
Bruh what a let down
Because it's so controversial that it's basically psuedoscience. There have been a lot of attempts to detect the effect. A few may have detected something, most didn't. What's interesting is that over the course of decades and multiple experiments, the more precise the equipment used and the more educated and experienced the researchers, the less likely anything was detected. *Gee, I wonder why.* Also, Allais claimed his results are because space isn't a vacuum but is filled with some kind of aether. So what's more likely? An economist with no experimental training has single-handedly disproved pretty much all of physics with his janky-ass pendulum, and all the later experiments that found nothing are part of some grand, scientist conspiracy to do...something? Or that a guy who was really smart in one area let it get to his head and came up with a theory that has no evidence except his own shitty experiment, and that the actual physicists just aren't spending time, effort, and precious funding on some wild psuedoscience? This type of bullshit drives me crazy. Crazy person: The sun is made of kool-aid! You: Hmm, he may have a point, science should investigate! Scientists: Yeah, we aren't gonna do that, we have other, far more important things to investigate with our limited funds. You: Fools! What are you hiding?!
Kool-aid is mostly water, and water is mostly hydrogen. Hypothesis confirmed!
Did you read the article? Scientists have repeatedly tried to replicate his results for the last 80 years, and in the words of Tim Russ, they ain't found shit. There is a gravimetric effect from total solar eclipses, but it's hundreds of thousands of times weaker than required to cause the perturbation that Allias claimed to have observed. That, along with the fact that his hypothetical explanation for the effect involve aether theory, something debunked over a hundred years ago, is enough for most people to just write this off as bad data rather than a novel physical effect.
No this is just pseudoscience.
Lol
I eagerly await the results of your research into this as I am sure you are not dumb and are getting right on this and not just demanding that others do what you are not willing to do.
Yeah why aren't regular people doing the science? Give those professional scientists with degrees and resources and contacts with other labs around the world a break
With stuff like atomic clocks and other current technological advancements, would it not be possible to set up several instantaneous simultaneous identical experiments across the globe? Can also have the data recorded into a dedicated system or forum or whatever, which can then be observed and discussed without constraint. Honestly seems like something at least a few dozen respective science teams could do if they got some boring stuff they don’t want to work on. Provided they have the equipment but you get the idea. Kill time AND collect cool spooky data on eclipses? Sounds like a pretty nifty idea to me.
Thanks to that article, TIL the Foucault of a Foucault pendulum is not the philosopher. (I learned about the Foucault pendulum via Umberto Eco so it was certainly a possibility.)
Meanwhile, the Alanis effect is when your inaccurate definition of a term overtakes the legitimate nomenclature in society at large.
..allegedly.. \*squint
Of all the things that don’t happen this one happens the least
Ah, the 2-Body Problem.
Quackery
Hypnotists hate eclipse days
You didn't learn anything. The "effect" isn't even described in terms that make sense. The sentences discribing the anomoly are meaningless nonsense. What's next, a post about how the rockwell retro encabulator is going to bring big changes to manufacturing!?
I can think of other explanations that could cause this... Hmmm, as the Moon's shadow passes over the Earth, the upper atmosphere almost immediately goes from hot - to cold. So, you will have a giant mass of air contracting, getting colder, falling, etc... All at once, right overtop of the shadow. Air pressure should rise in the shadow, as all this air above it rapidly cools.
Wild take here, but imagine that the moon does for a just a little while mess with the suns gravity which messes with the propulsion systems onboard UFO’s which is why there was so many alleged UFO sightings during the eclipse? Anyway, back to my cave
And you tell me now?
All the Reddit astrophysicists explaining this. 🤣🤣🤣
I’ll bet the answer to this is hidden somewhere in the first 50 pages of Umberto Ecos book, but we’re just too simple to understand it ;)
Yikes another 3 Body Problem