Erwin Saxl

Saxl is most well known for a series of controversial experiments in which he measured unexpected changes in the period of a torsion pendulum under various conditions. In one series of experiments, the period of a torsion pendulum situated inside a Faraday cage, with the pendulum and the cage connected by a conducting path, was observed to increase as the voltage on the cage was increased. In another experiment, the period of the pendulum was seen to increase during an eclipse. Saxl is reported to have attempted, without success, to get this work published in the Physical Review;

In the early 1960s, Saxl began a collaboration with Mildred Allen of Mount Holyoke College. In 1971, Saxl and Allen published a report of anomalous changes in the period of a torsion pendulum during a solar eclipse in 1970 and hypothesized that "gravitational theory needs to be modified". In addition, they observed unexplained diurnal variation in the period of the pendulum. None of the effects observed by Saxl and Allen have obvious explanations in terms of well-established theories of gravity and electromagnetism. Although more subtle explanations, still using conventional physical theory, have been proffered there does not appear to be general agreement as to the cause of the anomalies. Saxl and Allen's claim that general relativity must be modified, and earlier claims of a similar nature by Allais based on observations of anomalies in the behaviour of a paraconical pendulum, have not won acceptance by the physics community, and recent attempts to reproduce the phenomena have not been successful.