Weird Science II

A bit from Avatar reminds me of Ursula K. LeGuin's "Vaster Than Empires and More Slow", a short story republished in her collection The Wind's Twelve Quarters (1975). LeGuin postulates a world in which nodes in tree roots act like synapses. The plant life is one sentience. Maybe even vines and spores partake in it. As before, a cultural work reminds me of some science:

• The longest lived thing is arguably Pando, a grove of aspens in Utah that seems to be one plant, connected at the roots and propagating through runners like strawberries or mrytle.
• Or maybe it is an instance of the fungus Armillaria bulbosa in Oregon.

A Wikipedia article lists other such organisms, for what it's worth. (The references in this post are reminders for me to look up sometime.)

Weird Science III

I guess this is part of a series in which I describe oddities upon which I have stumbled. Here I focus on two phenomena in the measurement of gravity. Perhaps the theory of general relativity is wrong. (The link goes to an explanation of a different problem in physics). Of course, much more prosaic explanations are possible.

Maurice Allais, the recently dead "Nobel" laureate in economics, experimented with a paraconical pendulum during the 1950s. He discovered the Allais effect, which is a variation in the behavior of a pendulum during an eclipse. The plane of the pendulum rotated approximately ten degrees during the eclipse and then returned to the previously pattern. A number of scientists have tried to replicate this and similar effects with various experimental equipment during various eclipses. Some succeeded in replication and some failed. Allais’ explanation, apparently, was to revive the 19th century concept of the aether and argue that space is anisotropic.

Pioneers 10 and 11 were launched in 1972 and 1973, respectively. NASA was still in communication with them after they had passed beyond the orbit of Pluto and were more than 20 Astronomical Units away from the sun. (An AU is the average distance from the Earth to the sun.) Pioneers 10 and 11 have an anomalous acceleration towards the sun of an order of magnitude of 10^-7 centimeters per square seconds. In other words, as they move away from the sun, they are very slowly slowing down more than can be accounted for under the current (relativistic) understanding of gravity. Pioneers 10 and 11 are moving away from the sun at a rate of approximately 12 kilometers per second. (It dawned on me while writing the above that I am no longer sure how many planets are in our solar system.)

References

• Maurice Allais (1986). "The Concepts of Surplus and Loss and the Reformulation of the Theories of Stable General Equilibrium and Maximum Efficiency", in Foundations of Economics (edited by Mauro Baranzini and Roberto Scazzieri), Basil Blackwell.
• John D. Anderson et al. (1998) "Indication, from Pioneer 10/11, Galileo, and Ulysses Data, of an Apparent Anomalous, Weak, Long-Range Acceleration", arXiv:gr-qc/9808081v2 (1 October)
• John D. Anderson et al. (2005) "Study of the Anomalous Acceleration of Pioneer 10 and 11", arXiv:gr-qc/0104064v5 (10 March)
• Gibor Basri and Michael E. Brown (2006) "Planetesimals to Brown Dwarfs: What is a Planet?", Ann. Rev. Earth Planet. Sci., V. 34: pp. 193-216
• M. E. Brown, C. A. Trujillo, and D. L. Rabinowitz (2005) "Discovery of a Planetary-Sized Object in the Scattered Kuiper Belt", The Astrophysical Journal, 635: L97-L100, (10 December)
• Chris P. Duif (2004) "A Review of Conventional Explanations of Anomalous Observations during Solar Eclipses", arXiv:gr-qc/0408023 v5 (31 December)

Weird Science

I'm not sure I had heard of the Voynich Manuscript before this xkcd cartoon. But it did remind me of a couple of other artifacts whose existence I think extremely curious:

• The Antikythera Mechanism is a mechanical computer for calculating astronomical positions, and it dates from classical Greece.
• Piri Reis map dates, maybe, from before the Europeans had explored the New World, but yet shows the coast of South America and Anartica under the ice sheet.
• The Nazca lines are a series of drawings on a plateau in Peru dating from before Columbus and that make the most sense when viewed from the air.