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.”
▪ Presentation by Rémi Saumont (Director of Research at the INSERM – mathematics and physics) in n° 69 of the review “Fusion” (pp. 47-64) of a summary of Maurice Allais’s book “L’Anisotropie de l’espace” [The Anisotropy of Space], published by Clément Juglar in 1997.
▪ The eclipse of 11th August 1999, which traversed the northern hemisphere, provided an opportunity to make Maurice Allais’s role as a physicist better known: see Henry Aujard’s article in the engineering review for graduates of the prestigious École Centrale des Arts et Manufactures: “L’effet Allais” est bien une réalité – Les apports de l’éclipse du 11 août 1999 dans le domaine de la gravitation, et quand la NASA rentre en scène pour promouvoir “l’effet Allais” [The “Allais Effect” is indeed a reality – what has been learned about gravitation from the eclipse of 11th August 1999, and when NASA takes the floor to promote the “Allais effect”] (Revue des Centraliens, June 2000, pp. 32-35).
▪ Under the direction of Christian Marchal, in 1998, a team analysed the 7 monthly series of azimuth measurements obtained by Maurice Allais using an “isotropic” paraconic pendulum. This analysis chiefly consisted in rerunning the harmonic analysis of these series.
The main results were published in an article in “La Jaune et la Rouge”:
“An attempt to analyse Maurice Allais’s experiments on the paraconic pendulum” >> Click HERE
This article was in turn the subject of remarks and observations on the part of Maurice Allais which were published in a new article in “La Jaune et La Rouge”: Click HERE
The results of the harmonic analyses carried out by Maurice Allais were fully confirmed.
▪ The centenary of Maurice Allais’s birth (2011) was marked by the publication, under the direction of Hector A. Munera, professor of Physics at the University of Bogotá, by the Apeiron publication house (Montreal), of a work entitled:
“Should the Laws of Gravitation be Reconsidered? The Scientific Legacy of Maurice Allais”
This work was reviewed in “La Jaune et la Rouge” (September 2012): Click HERE
▪ Following Maurice Allais’s death, two articles specifically bearing on physics were published in “La Jaune et la Rouge” (May 2011):
- One, by Gérard Pile, a former editor-in-chief of the review: “Maurice Allais et la physique – Un parcours atypique de physicien” [Maurice Allais and physics – an unusual career for a physicist]: Click HERE
- The other by Jean-Bernard Deloly: “Maurice Allais et la Physique” [Maurice Allais and Physics]: Click HERE
▪ A summary presentation of all the observations conducted by Maurice Allais through its “paraconic” pendulum was done by Jean-Bernard Deloly: “The Maurice Allais’s pendulum: discovered phenomena”
▪ The data recorded during the continuous 1-month observations carried out by Maurice Allais from 1954 to 1960 using his “paraconic” pendulum, which are kept in his private archives, were gathered by Jean-Bernard Deloly in an Excel file: Allais-pendulum_data_2023-04-25