DOCUMENTS UPON THE ECLIPSE EFFECT
AND ALLAIS'S PARACONICAL PENDULUM
- IN ENGLISH!

Click Here to get to links for downloading the only documentation for his physics experiments that Professor Allais has ever produced in English - a series of three articles on "Should the Laws of Gravitation be Reconsidered?" which appeared in AeroSpace Engineering in 1959. Allais wrote these articles extremely carefully. In fact they contain much information and ideas not available elsewhere in his pendulum-related writings. I am told that this publication was sponsored by Wernher von Braun, who was quite interested in the eclipse effect and its possible implications for celestial mechanics.

And click Here to download a .PDF file of the (most important ones of the) original working drawings for Allais's paraconical pendulum. (527K)

Initially, the commencement of my interest in this large subject was my translations of Allais-related documents from French into English, and this section of the website serves to present these translations.

My first translation was the legendary 84 page Allais-to-NASA memoir of 1999:

Click Here for the Nasa Memoir download page.

Anisotropie: Allais's large 1997 work upon his physics experiments, "Anisotropie de l'Espace" (The Anisotropy of Space) remains untranslated for the moment. However, I have translated the few pages that actually deal with the physical construction of his paraconical pendulums. (There are many sections describing his experimental procedures and results, not yet translated.) Just click here for these fragmentary translations, in MS Word format.

Pictures: I think I have done something useful: here are decent scans of the four available photos of Prof. Allais's paraconical pendulum apparatus. Other versions of these pictures are available elsewhere on the internet, but these are better. When printed, each on a full sheet, the experimental setup is quite clear. One could wish for engineering drawings and description, and for detail pictures.... but these are a good start. Just click here for the Pictures page.

My next and ongoing project is to translate the ten notes by Allais from 1957 to 1960 to the French Academy of Sciences, in which he describes his experiments and various associated issues clearly and concisely. These are technical scientific papers, and the information density and assumed audience educational level are high. No effort is made to ease the reader's task.


Click Here for the Notes download page. WARNING: You can only get five of the English versions at the moment (because I haven't finished the rest of the translations). However, you can get the French versions of all ten of these Notes.



(Memo 1) Prof. Allais's many writings refer to one another in many places, usually by page number. Changing these references would be a difficult and open-ended task. Accordingly I take some pains to preserve the pagination of the original French documents.


(Memo 2) In all his voluminous work on the pendulum, Prof. Allais uses an idiosyncratic angular unit, the "grade". 400 grades equal one full turn, so 100 grades are equal to a right angle. He also occasionally uses centesimal minutes and seconds which are respectively hundredths and ten-thousandths of these grades. Whatever may be the merits of this system, it is not conventional, at least in modern work presented in English. However I have not attempted to eliminate these grades in the translations, because they are deeply embedded in the tables and graphs, and all Prof. Allais's angular results are expressed in terms of grades.



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