Fraud and illusion in the anti-Newtonian rear guard. The Coultaud-Mercier affair and Bertier's experiments, 1767 - 1777.

Details Fraud and illusion in the anti-Newtonian rear guard. The Coultaud-Mercier affair and Bertier's experiments, 1767 - 1777. Fraud and illusion in the anti-Newtonian rear guard. The Coultaud-Mercier affair and Bertier's experiments, 1767 - 1777.

Mar 1996

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1996isis...87...74e&link_type=abstract

Isis, Vol. 87, No. 1, p. 74 - 107

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

History Of Astronomy

Scientific paper

In 1769 the sixth issue of a new monthly, the Journal des Beaux-Arts et des Sciences, opened an attack on Newton's law of gravitation. In the first article of the June number, Jean Coultaud described pendulum experiments carried out in the mountains of Savoy. The experiments, apparently conducted with great care, seemed to prove that, contrary to Newton's inverse-square law, the weight of an object actually increases with its distance above the surface of the earth. Coultaud's results were soon confirmed by Mercier, as well as by Father Joseph-Etienne Bertier, who performed a completely different sort of experiment in the Church of the Oratory in Paris. These refutations of Newton's law of attraction were in turn refuted by leading mathematicians and mechanicians such as Jean le Rond d'Alembert and Joseph-Jérôme de Lalande. The anomalous gravity experiments provoked an eight-year debate marked by controversy, rising tempers, and a fresh round of experiments by investigators all over France. The debate appears all the more remarkable when one learns that the first round of experiments never took place and that Coultaud and Mercier, the authors of the first papers, were fictitious persons. Obviously, more than a detail of physics was at stake.

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