gwyn@brl-tgr.ARPA (Doug Gwyn <gwyn>) (08/15/85)
> So, I'm looking for some help in explaining this phenomenon. The > scientific community has known about this site since 1942 and > supposedly (according to the people who own the site) there was an > investigation around 1942 or later by some people at the U of Wisc. at > Madison. I have visited similar mysterious gravity demos. Usually they roll balls and pour water "uphill" as part of the act. There are anomalies in the earth's gravitational field, and petroleum exploration companies have been exploiting them for many years. Dr. Bryan of Rice University (perhaps retired by now) invented a nifty gravity meter that Texas Instruments marketed. It was made of torsion fibers and such. However, these anomalies are nowhere near as strong as what you describe and what I have seen demonstrated. I'm pretty sure it is an illusion. Perhaps the folks running the demo are sincere; that doesn't mean they have the right explanation. Note: Just because some scientists investigate some reported phenomenon, that doesn't mean that claims related to the phenomenon are necessarily well-founded. When I was working for Shell Pipe Line Co.'s R&D lab, the Rice University Physics Department (my alma mater) referred some "garage inventor" to us rather than waste time on him themselves. He had constructed a fluidic device that was intended to exploit an inductive gravitational effect produced by accelerating nearby mass. Specifically, the device consisted of a flat channel in a long metal block, with a Plexiglas cover. There was an air inlet at one end of the channel, and at the other end the was an outlet. The channel was milled round (about 2 cm radius) at the outlet end and a Plexiglas disk was mounted there with rather small clearance between it and the circular part of the metal wall. The disk had been made by gluing together two circular plates which had been milled on one side so that the assembled disk had an interior toroidal tunnel not far from the disk's edge. In this toroidal track, a ball bearing was placed. Now, the fellow's idea was that the airflow would have to accelerate going around the disk (correct), and that there would be an induced gravitational field tending to drag the bearing around the track toward the outlet (correct). What he didn't realize was just how small a force he was talking about; certainly not enough to detect with this apparatus. Confident that it couldn't work, we hooked it up to high-pressure air, and guess what.. The ball bearing zipped right around to hover near the outlet! Needless to say, this caused us quite a bit of consternation, so we spent a fair amount of additional time investigating the matter. We came up with a couple of mechanisms that would explain the effect, neither of which had anything to do with gravitational effects. I'm not sure what the moral of the story is, other than perhaps that the real world is quite complex and one should not necessarily believe the first plausible-sounding explanation offered for some phenomenon.
dbb@aicchi.UUCP (Burch) (08/25/85)
> > So, I'm looking for some help in explaining this phenomenon. The > > scientific community has known about this site since 1942 and > > supposedly (according to the people who own the site) there was an > > investigation around 1942 or later by some people at the U of Wisc. at > > Madison. > > I have visited similar mysterious gravity demos. Usually they > roll balls and pour water "uphill" as part of the act. > ... > However, these anomalies are nowhere near as strong as what you > describe and what I have seen demonstrated. I'm pretty sure > it is an illusion. Perhaps the folks running the demo are > sincere; that doesn't mean they have the right explanation. One can actually BUILD such a structure. An illusion building was built at Knotts Berry Farm. The only thing of scientific interest is the way they fool human perception... -Ben Burch