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backwards. It veered furthest off course twenty minutes before maximum eclipse, when the Moon covered a large portion of the Sun’s surface before returning to its normal swing once the eclipse was over. It seemed that the pendulum had somehow been influenced by the alignment of the Earth, the Moon and the Sun.
    This was totally unexpected and utterly startling. Allais’ experiment was being conducted indoors, out of the sunlight so there was no apparent way the eclipse could have affected it. Allais was at a loss to explain what had taken place but when he conducted an improved version of his experiment in June and July 1958 with two pendulums six kilometres apart he found the same effect. Then during the partial solar eclipse of October 22 nd 1959, Allais once again witnessed the same erratic rotation – but this time similar effects were reported by three Romanian scientists who knew nothing of Allais’ work.
    Many people have questioned his results, mainly because science does not like that which it cannot explain. Many others have now repeated the experiment with mixed results: some found no measurable effect, but most have confirmed the result at different locations – including one conducted in an underground laboratory! 8
    It is interesting to note that in 1988 Allais was awarded a Nobel Prize for economics. Like Alexander Thom (and many other paradigm busters) a major discovery had come from someone working outside their own field. These are bright people who are driven by curiosity and who are not the products of conventional training.
    Allais despairs at the standards of those that oppose without logic or reasoning: ‘In the history of science, every revolutionary result meets with very strong opposition… Relativists say I’m wrong without providing any demonstration. Most of them haven’t even read what I wrote.’
    In 1970 Erwin Saxl and Mildred Allen of Mount Holyoke College, Massachusetts, studied the behaviour of a pendulum before, during and after a total eclipse. The pair took a slightly different approach to Allais as they used a torsion pendulum, which is a massive disc suspended from a wire attached to its centre. Rotating the disc slightly causes the wire to twist. When it is released, the disc continues to twirl first clockwise, then anticlockwise, with a fixed period. But during an eclipse, their pendulum sped up significantly. They concluded that gravitational theory needs to be modified.
    In India in 1995, D C Mishra and M B S Rao of the National Geophysical Research Institute in Hyderabad observed a small but sudden drop in the strength of gravity when using an extremely accurate gravimeter during a solar eclipse. But results have been mixed. When the eclipsed Sun rose above Helsinki on July 22nd 1990, Finnish geophysicists found no disturbance to the usual swing, yet in March 1997 scientists observed gravimeter anomalies during an eclipse in a very remote area of north-east China.
    The mystery continues and yet no academic institution appears willing to invest time and money to study this phenomenon in depth. However, Thomas Goodey, a self-funding independent researcher from Brentford in England, has decided that he will investigate the Allais effect by using several pendulums during an eclipse. Because modern equipment is much more accurate and sensitive than that available in 1954 – giving twenty to one hundred times better resolution, he is confident of a clear result.
    Goodey plans to travel the world over the next few years with twelve specially constructed pendulums. In May 2004, he presented his strategy at a meeting of the Society for Scientific Exploration in Las Vegas and invited physicists to join him. As
New Scientist
reported, several leapt at the chance.
    Goodey suspects that the anomalies occur when an observer is near the line that connects the centres of masses of the Sun and the Moon. During a total solar eclipse, the Sun–Moon line intersects the surface of the Earth