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Maurice Allais

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Maurice Allais
Maurice Allais
Born(1911-05-31)May 31, 1911
Paris, France
DiedOctober 9, 2010(2010-10-09) (aged 99)
Saint-Cloud, France
ResidenceParis, France
NationalityFrench
Known forAllais Effect, Aether, Special Relativity
Scientific career
FieldsPhysicist, Economist

Maurice Félix Charles Allais (31 May 1911 – 9 October 2010) was a French economist and physicist. He was the 1988 winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics "for his pioneering contributions to the theory of markets and efficient utilization of resources." Although he is best known for his work in economics, Allais also carried out extensive experimental and theoretical work in physics, and is remembered for the Allais Effect, an anomalous behaviour of a pendulum reported during solar eclipses.

Biography

Maurice Allais was born on 31 May 1911 in Paris, France, into a modest family; his father was a shopkeeper and his grandfather a carpenter. His father, taken prisoner during the First World War, died in Germany in 1915, an event that affected Allais deeply. Despite his young age, he resolved to honour his father's name.

Allais studied at the Lycée Lakanal and then entered the École Polytechnique in Paris, from which he graduated at the top of his class. He continued his studies at the École Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Paris, and later obtained a doctorate in engineering from the University of Paris (Faculty of Science) in 1949. From 1944 he served as Professor of Economics at the École Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Paris, and in 1946 he became director of its Economic Analysis Centre. He also held teaching positions at other institutions, including the University of Paris X–Nanterre.

Allais died on 9 October 2010 in Saint-Cloud, near Paris, at the age of 99.

Scientific contributions

Economics

Allais made pioneering contributions to mathematical economics, general equilibrium theory, capital theory, decision theory and monetary policy. He independently developed an early version of the overlapping generations model (1947) and formulated a version of the "golden rule" of optimal economic growth before it became widely known. He is also remembered for the "Allais paradox" (1953), an experimental result that challenged the expected utility hypothesis and anticipated later developments in behavioural economics. For this body of work he was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 1988.

Physics

Allais came to physics from outside it, and late. Between 1952 and 1960, while holding a chair in economics, he ran one of the longest and most obsessively controlled experimental programmes in the history of the subject — and concluded from it that the theory of relativity was wrong and that space is anisotropic. He was awarded the Galabert Prize of the French Astronautical Society in 1959 for this work, and his principal paper appeared in Aero/Space Engineering at the request of Wernher von Braun.

The paraconical pendulum

His instrument was a short pendulum — an equivalent length of about 83 cm, some 12 kg in all — hung not from a wire but from a stirrup resting on a 6.5 mm steel ball free to roll on a flat plate. This "paraconical" support lets the bob trace an ellipse rather than hold a plane, and it is the orientation of that ellipse that Allais tracked. The protocol was relentless: the pendulum was released every 20 minutes by burning a thread, observed for 14 minutes, then stopped and re-released in the plane of the last observed azimuth, so that the readings formed one continuous chain — 72 series a day, day and night, for a month at a time. He carried out six such month-long runs between 1954 and 1960, changing the steel ball after every run and the bearing plate weekly to exclude wear. From July 1958 a second identical pendulum ran in parallel in a disused chalk quarry at Bougival, 57 m underground and 6.5 km away from his laboratory at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, built specifically to answer the objection that the results were thermal or vibrational artefacts.

The Allais effect

Main article: Allais Effect

The total eclipse of 30 June 1954 fell during one of these runs. The azimuth of the pendulum's plane of oscillation departed sharply from its trend, rising about 5 centesimal degrees above it at onset, reaching a maximum departure of about 15 centesimal degrees — 15 grads, or 13.5 ordinary degrees — some twenty minutes before the maximum of the eclipse, and decaying to about 1.2 grads before the eclipse ended. Allais noted that the forces implied were of the same order as those producing the Foucault effect itself, and wrote that the disturbance "gave the very definite impression of a screen effect". A second eclipse on 2 October 1959 caught another run in progress and produced a similar but distinctly weaker disturbance; only about 37 per cent of the solar disc was covered at Paris.

This is the observation that became known as the Allais Effect, and it has been pursued, replicated and disputed for seventy years — with a torsion pendulum by Erwin J Saxl and Mildred Allen during the eclipse of 1970, with gravimeters in India in 1995 and China in 1997, and with torsion balances in Ukraine and Romania in 2009. Because a gravity that can be screened by an interposed Moon cannot be the geometry of spacetime, some researchers read the effect as evidence that gravity is corpuscular — a flux of particles or gravitons that matter partially absorbs, as in the Particle Model of Bob de Hilster and David de Hilster and in the Le Sage tradition. That argument, its proponents, and the substantial disagreements among them are set out on the Allais Effect page.

It is worth stressing here that Allais himself did not hold the shielding interpretation. The eclipses were incidental to his main result, which was the periodic structure of the pendulum's motion over the long runs.

Anisotropy of space and the "new field"

The continuous runs revealed periodic components in the azimuth, including one at about 24 h 50 min — the mean lunar day. That a lunisolar period should appear is unremarkable; the amplitude was not. Allais calculated that conventional lunar and solar tidal action on his apparatus fell short of the observed effect by a factor he put at some 108; a recomputation by his collaborators in 2022 gives a smaller but still extraordinary discrepancy of roughly six orders of magnitude for direct tidal action. He concluded that something else was acting:

In its present status of the discussion, the abnormalities observed can be accounted for only by considering the existence of a new field, namely, by envisaging the existence of complementary terms which until now had remained unnoticed.

— Maurice Allais, "Should the Laws of Gravitation Be Reconsidered?", Aero/Space Engineering 18 (1959)

He ran optical experiments in parallel — sightings on fixed marks and collimators at Saint-Germain in 1958 and at the IGN in 1959 — and reported a remarkable consistency between those deviations and the pendulum readings taken 6 km away and 57 m underground. From this he concluded that the velocity of light is not strictly constant but varies slightly with direction, and interpreted the whole body of results as evidence for an aether and for the anisotropy of space.

The re-examination of Miller, Michelson and Esclangon

Allais then turned to the historical record, arguing that the same anisotropy was already present in data collected decades earlier and dismissed. He re-examined the Michelson–Morley experiment of 1887, the Morley–Miller experiments of 1902–05, and above all Dayton C Miller's Mount Wilson interferometry of 1925–26, together with Esclangon's observations on the dissymmetry of space.

Re-binning Miller's readings by sidereal rather than civil time, Allais reported a coherent sidereal-diurnal component and a geometric regularity in the data — the centres of the elliptical hodographs falling on a circle — that he argued was far too orderly to be thermal noise. He published this as two notes to the Comptes Rendus de l'Académie des Sciences in 1999, under the titles "Des régularités très significatives dans les observations interférométriques de Dayton C. Miller 1925–1926" and "Nouvelles régularités très significatives…", followed in 2000 by a third note addressing the question directly: were the regularities temperature effects, or anisotropy of space? That note is a sustained rebuttal of Shankland's 1955 temperature-gradient refutation of Miller, which Allais held to be statistically inadequate and contradicted by data inside Shankland's own paper. He set out the case at book length in L'Anisotropie de l'Espace (Clément Juglar, 1997), translated into English as The Anisotropy of Space (L'Harmattan, 2019), and pressed it further in L'Effondrement de la Théorie de la Relativité (2004).

Allais organised his case around four experimental domains he held to be windows on a single underlying anisotropy: the paraconical pendulum with anisotropic support, the same pendulum with isotropic support, the optical sightings on marks and collimators, and the re-examined Miller and Esclangon data.

Reception

Allais's physics is not accepted by mainstream science. Attempts to reproduce the eclipse anomaly have produced inconsistent results, and several well-instrumented campaigns — including four superconducting gravimeters during the eclipse of August 1999 — have returned nulls; the reported anomalies are generally attributed to environmental and instrumental factors. Miller's residuals are likewise still treated as thermal artefacts, and no mainstream rebuttal engaging Allais's statistical re-analysis by name appears to have been published. Among dissident researchers the reception has been warmer: James DeMeo cites Allais approvingly in his own re-examination of Miller's ether-drift data, and the eclipse work continues to be pursued by Thomas Goodey, Dimitrie Olenici and Allais's collaborator Jean-Bernard Deloly.

Allais put his own view of the stakes in the title of his 2003 article for the review of the École Polytechnique: the regularities in Miller's observations amounted, he argued, to "the fundamental and complete collapse of relativity theory."

Honors

Abstracts

Papers by Maurice Allais:

Papers by Others (related to Maurice Allais):

Books

See also

External links

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