Maurice Allais and the Anisotropy of Space

[natecull]

In the late 1950s, when Townsend Brown and a small circle of friends where heavily promoting a new "gravity scene" with "experimental rigs" - part of which scene was in France - there appeared another researcher making extraordinary, Einstein-defying, claims about gravity. This researcher came to the attention of Townsend's friends the Gravity Research Foundation, where he won a prize, and also to the attention of Wernher von Braun, who published his essays. Then, in the 1960s - much like Townsend Brown - his physics research seemed to be totally rejected by the establishment, and he vanished from sight.

Except that Maurice Allais (1911-2010 - six years younger than Townsend Brown) went on to win a Nobel Prize in Economics in 1988. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Allais

A Maurice Allais Foundation exists, created by his daughter Christine. It has an English section which gives a lot of useful information, particularly on his controversial physics research.

http://www.fondationmauriceallais.org/t ... h/?lang=en

Presentations and analyses of Maurice Allais’s research
By Jean-Bernard DELOLY

▪ From 1957 to 1960 Maurice Allais’s research struck a certain chord and was discussed in numerous publications and in-depth debates, none of which enabled his findings to be invalidated notwithstanding the hostility they had aroused in certain quarters of the scientific community: it is reasonable to suppose that if they had been vitiated by gross errors this would certainly have been pointed out.

Witness, for instance, the following extract from a letter written by General Bergeron to Wernher von Braun in May 1959:

“Before writing to you I judged it necessary to visit both of Professor Allais’s laboratories (one of which is located 60 m underground) in the company of eminent specialists – including two professors from the École Polytechnique. In the course of a discussion which lasted several hours, it was not possible to locate any significant source of error or any attempted explanation which resisted analysis.

“I think I ought also to inform you that in the course of these last two years, more than ten members of the Académie des Sciences and more than thirty eminent personalities, gravitation specialists of various kinds, have come to visit either his Saint-Germain laboratory or his underground laboratory at Bougival.

“Detailed discussion took place, not only on these occasions, but also several times in various scientific milieux, notably at the Académie des Sciences and at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. None of them enabled any explanation whatsoever to be brought forward in the context of currently recognized theories.”

I wonder how this letter might have played into the US scientific and military establishment's attitude toward Townsend Brown's work in 1959? Well, one result appears to be this:

http://www.fondationmauriceallais.org/t ... m/?lang=en

a paper recapitulating this research up to 1957 which was published in early 1958 in “Perspective X”, the review of the École Polytechnique, under the title “Doit-on reconsidérer les lois de la gravitation ?” [Should the laws of gravitation be reconsidered ?] (pp. 90-104). The text of this paper was reprised in an article in the review “Fusion” in 1998 (Fusion, November-December 1998, pp. 40-53).

An English translation of this paper was subsequently published as two successive articles in the American review “Aero-Space Engineering”, at the recommendation of NASA director Wernher von Braun, under the title “Should the laws of Gravitation be Reconsidered ?” (Aero/Space Engineering, September 1959, n° 9, pp. 46-52, October 1959, n° 10, pp. 51-55, November 1959, n° 11, p. 55). It was to play a decisive role in making known Maurice Allais’s research.

And then... throughout the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s.... silence.


In 1997, Allais summarised his 1950s work in "L’Anisotropie de l’espace" [The Anisotropy of Space], published by Clément Juglar. In 1999, this book was further summarised and translated into English for David Noever of NASA:

https://web.archive.org/web/20190806172 ... report.pdf

The present memoir has been prepared at the occasion of the vast enquiry initiated by NASA under the direction of David Noever about the “Allais Effect” during the eclipse of 11 August 1999.

The general thrust of Allais' research is that a particular type of "Focault Pendulum" appears to show cycles of not-quite-24-hours that match an influence by either the moon, stars, or planets. This seems very similar in style, if not in actual data, to the "sidereal radiation" observed by Townsend Brown with his Differential Electrometer. There seem to be observable rhythms that should not, according to current mainstream textbook understandings of Relativity, be detectable by any instruments whatsoever.

And yet it moves.

A 2016 paper by Jean-Bernard Deloly, who writes on the Foundation website, sums up the then-known state of Allais replications:

http://www.fondationmauriceallais.org/w ... rad_2-.pdf

In view of the analysis made by Maurice Allais3 all these conditions can be considered satisfied at least as regards:
- a lunar diurnal periodic component of 24h50mn;
- a diurnal periodic component of 24h (or more precisely, of about 24h4)
-a lunar monthly periodic component (estimated sidereal Lunar: period 27, 32 days);
- a semi-annual periodic component, the maximum of which is near the spring equinox5;
- a slow variation which appears as a long periodic component of 5, 9 years (and which can be considered as resulting of a global action of the solar system).'

As regards the direction variable over time towards which the plan of oscillation was called back (the so-called "direction of anisotropy of space"), Maurice Allais experimentally eliminate any role of the anisotropy of the support and of the suspension of the pendulum6. We can thus think that this variable direction results only from causes external to the pendulum, and, more than fifty years later, it remains apparently inexplicable by conventional causes.

Deloly continues to publish (as recently as this year, 2023) research on replication studies of Allais' pendulum.
https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinfo ... rid=125360

Regards, Nate

[Jan Lundquist]

Thank you, Nate. Townsend made his second Paris trip in 56. His sidereal radiation work and Allais' are too similar for them not to have connected at some time.

Before his first Paris Trip, Townsend had hoped to pull off a "force multiplier effect" with the French leading a multinational research effort. From the Montgolfier Report, p. 111

He explained to me that there are still breakthroughs left to be achieved in aviation material sciences whereby the inertial properties of the so-modified aviation material would remain unchanged however the material itself is likely to experience a reduced attraction to the force of gravity, -such that the material would react as if it’s weigh would be reduced by the order of 1/10 its normal weight. In fact, rare earths are now being exploited because of their vulnerability to this negative gravity force effect.

Brown mentioned a material known as “Loess” which is located in Asia and responds alternatively to the force of Gravity. Brown also mentioned that an element known as Erbium is the “Rare Earth” substance which responds most favourably to the gravity reducing effect. (as in Lanthanide, -which is the rare earth equivalent). If more research were performed on these materials, it might be possible to create new super light-weight aircraft materials.

Brown claims that some of these materials exhibit a slightly higher ambient temperature, which seems to suggest a source of energy which is demonstrated to occur at the molecular level rather than the atomic level of thermal interactions. Argyle exhibits this type of effect and Brown mentioned that East German airport runways have recently been resurfaced with an Argyle mixture to help melt the new fallen snow on the
runways. He concluded that this activity suggests that people living on their side of the iron curtain are on the same track as we are, and that further research in this domain is now a “life and death issue”.

A man named Charles F. Brush was the person most prominently responsible for conducting research in this field in the past. Brush was the founder of Brush Electronics, General Electric, Linde Air Products Etc. Brush died during one of his experiments (in1929 at the age of 80) shortly afterwards the government lost interests in continuing this avenue of research in material sciences.

Brown said he was in contact with European scientists who have also pondered upon this area of research, and if there was a ongoing research project in Europe surely the US would take note of it and they would probably want to implicate themselves in the project in an effort to determine how the underlying principles of this mysterious effect actually function. Brown asked me to call him on the phone the next day and in the mean time he would find out exactly how much he can openly contribute to a European collaboration.

At 23:30 in The Dark History of AntiGravity (Quantum Gravity Exposed) Louis Witten, of RIAS, is quoted as speaking of the potential for antigravity materials, "On the night of a new moon, a guy in France discovered that a pendulum moved faster or slow" and a man named Townsend discovered there was a type of bismuth that was repelled instead of attracting."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBA3RUxkZdc

Read into that, what you will.

I am going through Witten's oral history, now.
https://www.aip.org/history-programs/ni ... ries/36985

Paul, what do you know about Stellarators?

My first postdoc was with Lyman Spitzer to work on the Stellarator. I don’t know if you know what the Stellarator is....It was to make controlled fusion. In other words, controlled thermonuclear reactions for energy. It’s a tremendous project, international now. I forgot what it’s called, but I think they’re building a great big plant in Spain some place I think. But it was unfortunately classified at the time. It was supported by the Atomic Energy Commission and it was classified, so Lyman Spitzer and I did publish a paper on ionizing and heating a plasma.

[natecull]

Louis Witten, of RIAS, is quoted as speaking of the potential for antigravity materials, "On the night of a new moon, a guy in France discovered that a pendulum moved faster or slow" and a man named Townsend discovered there was a type of bismuth that was repelled instead of attracting."

I'd love to know the context for that quote! I keep confusing Louis Witten with Bryce and Cecile DeWitt, since both of them crossed paths with Townsend's circle around the Gravity Research Foundation. The DeWitts were famously uninterested in the Bahnson Labs devices, and my impression of Witten was that he wasn't much interested in Townsend's claims and instead went down the completely unfruitful String Theory path. Or at least his son Edward did.

Witten's WIkipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Witten ) does remind me that he was in both RIAS and headed GRC from 1968, the era when GRC became increasingly, well, boring and mainstream and unproductive from the "antigravity" standpoint.

So that's why I'd like to know the context for Louis' remarks. Was he talking in retrospect about that period around 1957 when he *did* briefly believe there were weird gravity things afoot? Because it doesn't seem to me that he carried that belief with him through the rest of his career.

Brown mentioned a material known as “Loess” which is located in Asia and responds alternatively to the force of Gravity.

Yep! I remember in the late 1980s, in high school, reading Townsend Brown materials containing this claim. It give me some interesting feelings, because loess is in fact not just in Asia. New Zealand is full of the stuff. It's just a sort of silty yellow clay dust (volcanic originally). I can understand why it would be light - it blows all over the Canterbury Plains - but nobody that I know of has ever reported anything odd about it other than the taste when it gets in your mouth.

Would be utterly hilarious if loess was in fact a geo-strategic Rare Earth Gravitational Isotope and you could make flying saucers out of it.

Regards, Nate

[Jan Lundquist]

Louis Witten's oral history is online, Nate. He gives a thought provoking account of his visit to "Bahnson's" lab.

https://www.aip.org/history-programs/ni ... ries/36985

Re: electromer use...within a year or two of Townsend bringing his electromerters to the NRL, Ross Gunn would patent a "portable electrometer". But I imagine that in order for Allais to do his pendulum research, a stable set up was more important than a portable one.



Jan

[natecull]

Louis Witten's oral history is online, Nate. He gives a thought provoking account of his visit to "Bahnson's" lab.

Aha! Right, so that Witten quote does come from the oral history. Excerpt:

Witten: But then, that’s when George Trimble came. George Trimble was the vice president of the Martin Company in charge of special projects or special thought — he was supposed to think of new things. And there was a new thing in the wind at that time which was anti-gravity, so he also thought well anti-gravity would be a nice thing.
Salisbury: So it was in the wind — in what sense was it in the wind?
W: Well, a lot of people were talking about it in the country. There was a guy in North Carolina, Agnew Bahnson, doing experiments on it.
S: So it was in the popular press, is that correct?
W: Oh, it was international press, not just the American press. A guy in France was discovering that on the night of a new moon a pendulum swung faster or slower. A guy named Townsend discovered that there was a type of bismuth that was repelled instead of attracting. I can’t remember all the people, but it was…
Rickles: But it was Babson, too, of course.
W: Babson, yeah. And also was the Air Force. And probably Josh Goldberg. It was before his time there, but I’ll come to that. Anyway, so everybody left but laughed at George Trimble; all the scientist left laughed but George Trimble. I guess he said, “I’ll show them.” He had a lot of influence at the Martin Company, and in those days, the Martin Company was very, very successful financially. So they decided, based on his record, they should start a laboratory to do fundamental research. And they hired another engineer to be the director of the laboratory. His name was Welcome Bender the IV.... So, Welcome Bender IV became the director of this new research laboratory that was to do fundamental research.
S: Glenn Martin Corporation is in Baltimore.
W:It’s in Baltimore. It’s not the Glenn Martin. My first tour it was the Glenn L. Martin Company. My second tour it was called first the Martin Company, and then the Martin Marietta Corporation, and now it’s Martin-Lockheed. So not for a long time has it been Glenn L. In my first tour, Glenn L. was alive, and he used to go around the company wearing admirals things around with his suit.
R: Was he an admiral?
W: He was an airplane builder.
So anyway, Welcome Bender started this thing, and he immediately made a decision, which I knew meant that the lab was going to be unstable. This decision was not only was it going to do fundamental research without applications, but it was going to do it making a profit. I laughed, too, but unfortunately I couldn’t laugh. I couldn’t convince them that it was stupid.
...
S:So would you say it was primarily this effort by the Martin Company that persuaded the Air Force that there might be…?
W: No, no, no. It was in the wind. When I say it was in the wind, it was in the wind. I was invited to give talks in Seattle and all over the country, and I quickly learned that I should talk about gravity and they would ask me about anti-gravity, I’d say, “Well, we just learn about gravity. If there’s anything to anti-gravity, it’ll come along.” [Laughter]
R: Presumably if you’ve just had the atom bomb and you’ve shown that something can be done with nuclear energy, the next natural thing to look at would be gravity.
...
W: But when I first started with Bender, I really wasn’t doing anything in modern physics, and we talked about what I should do in this lab. I told him I was interested either in particle physics or theory of gravity, and naturally he chose the theory of gravity as what I should concentrate on because that’s what they started with, was an interest in gravity.
S: What date would this be?
W: I don’t know. You’d have to look at the history of RIAS. It was approximately ‘55.
...
R: Well maybe you could connect it to the Institute of Field Physics. There’s a bit in an interview of Bryce DeWitt on the archive I just mentioned [AIP archive: https://www.aip.org/history-programs/ni ... istories/2... where he says he’d just been to meet with the Bahnson company, and he’d just been to visit either you or Welcome Bender or George Trimble about you trying to hire him or get him to run some civil institute? Remember this? So, I think it was in 1955. I think you maybe tried to headhunt Bryce DeWitt, is this right?
R: For RIAS, were you in charge of hiring?
W: Pretty much in charge of hiring for everybody, but to recommend physicists, yes.
R: So do you remember briefly meeting DeWitt? Apparently you flew into Baltimore.
W: I think so, yes. I don’t remember but I believe that’s true. I mean, you’re reminding me. But it was obvious that nothing would come of it, so that’s why I forgot.
R: So, he wasn’t interested in pursuing that.
W: Yeah.
S: But when we left off, you mentioned Bahnson had expressed an interest in pursuing antigravity.
W: Yeah.
S: And that was an opening, we thought, into an engagement with relativity for you.
W: No, no, no, it had nothing to do with it. I was already doing the study of relativity. But where we left off, I think, I had had the interview with Welcome Bender, and he decided that of the things I had mentioned as possible interests, he wanted me to study gravity. So I proceeded to study Einstein’s theory of relativity.
S: And that was the first engagement with general relativity.
W: Yes. The first thing I tried to do was read Bergmann’s book, so I worked my way through Bergmann’s book. Bahnson came a couple years later. I don’t remember exactly the sequence. I was already doing quite a bit of relativity by the time Bahnson came along. But I don’t know what you want to know about Bahnson. He claimed that he had an antigravity thing, and Welcome Bender sent me down to see what he had.
R: Did he claim to have built something?
W: Yes, he had a laboratory. I went to visit him and visited his laboratory, and the basic idea of his laboratory was he had a strong electrostatic field, which was about 150,000 volts over a distance of about like that, about a meter. And he had an operator operating this thing. But I knew enough about experiments to know that this was not a very happy place, because I knew that for strong electrostatic fields, there shouldn’t be any sharp points around. Everything should be curved, and nothing was curved.
S: Oh my goodness.
W: And the operator was working on it, his hair was standing up. [Chuckling] And then Bahnson took a long cylindrical pipe, and he smoked a cigarette, and he blew through the pipe into this central place where the electrostatic field was, and low and behold, the smoke rose. Explain it. [Laughter] Just at that moment, there’s a table with a sharp corner, and I was standing with my back to it, about a foot away, and there was a spark from my backside to the corner of the table. So I said, “Let’s go down into the hall.” [Laughter] And I said it’s nothing worth explaining. It’s completely understandable. You all explain it. It’s not worth explaining. You had an electric field, you got ionization, you get motion. I said look at the operator, his hair is standing on end! [Laughter]
R: Antigravity too!
W: And I didn’t talk to him much; I just left.
R: But how interesting, though, that he suddenly was able to…
W: This guy was a millionaire, multimillionaire. He owned a tobacco company, half of the RJ Reynolds or whatever tobacco company. So he started the institute for Bryce. He started, I don’t know what they call it, the Bahnson Field Institute. I don’t know what they call it.
R: The Institute for Field Physics.
W: Yeah. And Bryce became the director. I don’t know how much money Bahnson gave. But Bahnson flew his own airplane around. Crashed into electric pole, electric wires, killed himself.
R: Yeah, in ’64. Okay, so he wasn’t very impressive as a…
W: I had so little contact with him. I don’t know why you bring it up, but it’s fine.
R: Well, it’s an amusing story.
W: This is also an amusing story. There was this guy who I told you I forget his name who claimed that bismuth was antigravity.
R: A French guy?
W: No, he’s from either Indiana or Illinois. He wasn’t French. The French guy, he had the moon and stuff — that’s a different guy. Anyway, I had a meeting with the vice president, and with Welcome Bender, the vice president, who brought up this bismuth thing, and I told him everybody knows the properties of bismuth. But he’s a smart guy and asked me, “Did you every think there might be an isotope of bismuth?”
R: [Laughter] That could make all the difference.
W: So I said no, but to find it you’d have to test every bismuth nucleus in the world. Anyway…
S: Was there, in fact, much comprehension by Welcome Bender and by others, of the nature of what you were actually doing at the Institute?
W: No, no.
R: I supposed it shows how little understood gravity was, as well. Hmm. So what kind of research were you were doing at RIAS?
W: Well, first I was studying gravity, so I did research in relativity, mostly looking for solutions of Einstein’s equations and things like that. But there are two things that I am sort of the most pleased with. Misner and Wheeler and the group there were working on what they called geometrodynamics, which they called an already unified field theory. You probably know about that. They were trying to show how all physics might come from it. And I think I showed a fundamental difficulty, which essentially put them on a different track, because geometrodynamics has in that respect some problem, and I think I showed that is one thing. And the second thing I did was introduce spinors into the analysis of relativity. I wasn’t a very good mathematician, so after introducing it, I did try to do the wrong things with it. But Roger Penrose, who is an excellent mathematician also introduced spinors, and did the right thing with them, so he became well known for it. My contribution isn’t particularly known.

And then it goes down the usual mainstream gravity mathematical rabbitholes, etc.

Yes, I remember reading this interview a few years back. Things we can learn from it:

1. Louis Witten wasn't particularly interested in antigravity, but he knew that it was "in the wind" in international pop-science headlines circa 1955-1957
2. He didn't even remember Townsend Brown's name! Although he remembered it once.
3. Witten associated Townsend Brown's "gravitational isotope" theory particularly with bismuth. (I'm guessing this is probably where the "bismuth is magic" idea leaked into the UFOlogy field.) Witten also was absolutely dismissive of the isotope theory. I admit, it is a very odd theory and there is absolutely no mainstream theoretical base for it (I'm guessing Townsend came to it through Brush's rather odd beliefs; *possibly* through some experiments, but he doesn't seem to have documented any until his 1970s sand shaker one).
4. Witten does not seem to even associate Townsend Brown with Bahnson, despite Townsend being the consultant there. Ie, he doesn't think of Townsend as "the guy behind Bahnson" which he was, but rather "the guy with the bizarre isotope theory haha".
5. Witten, like the DeWitts, was absolutely dismissive of the electrogravity experiments, wouldn't even look at them. They are an "amusing story" to him, nothing else.
6. Witten doesn't even mention Allais other than that his name was in the pop-culture headlines. I imagine he must have thought even less of him than he thought of Bahnson and Townsend.

So yeah. The only difference between Witten and the DeWitts seems to me that Witten worked for Glenn Martin's Research Institute for Advanced Study while the DeWitts worked for Bahnson's Institute for Field Physics. And both of them looked down on the industrialists they were working for, but were happy to take their money. And as quickly as they could, they diverted their activities away from antigravity to "real science" like General Relativity, which over 60 years later has produced.... well, I don't want to say "nothing of value", but very *little* of value compared to even quantum physics.

(Because the objects GR studies and which it claims to be its "successes" are generally millions to billions of years away from us - perhaps thousands of years away for "extremely close" objects - while quantum objects are right next to us. To coin a phrase: I don't get what the Great Attractor is. [1])

[1] Whatever it is, it's considered to be 150 to 250 million years away, so *probably* not of immediate concern to even US Presidential candidates, unless they have *extremely* good health plans. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Attractor

Nate

[Jan Lundquist]

I don't know if Witten forgot Townsend's name in regards to the bismuth remark, or never knew it. He was a generation younger than Townsend, so he would have been a RIAS hiree, but not a top level insider/organizer.

Also, though Witten identifies bismuth as the metal with the particular isotope, the "space metal" fragments that Townsend retrieved and had analyzed in the sixties were said to be a composition of Boron and aluminum.

"Boron is classified as a metalloid is not found naturally on earth." https://www.americanelements.com/bismut ... 37233-77-5

I don't understand how they can say that. California's Death Valley was settled in the 1800s by Boron miners of the 20 Mule Team Borax company. It is still being mined in other locations in the state and we even have a town named Boron. So, what the heck?

A quick search tells me that boron-doped bismuth may be used today for many reasons, one of which is improved solar panel performance. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs ... .202101128.

Were the two elements being used together in the sixties as some sort of experimental meta material?

Jan