Erwin Joseph Saxl (May 7, 1904 – January 28, 1981) was a physicist and inventor. He was born in Vienna in 1904 and received his Ph.D. there in 1927. In the late 1920s he emigrated to the United States. In 1935 he founded the Saxl Instrument Company, which designed and manufactured tension meters for use in the textile industry, and later in other industries. The company, which Saxl ran jointly with his wife, Lucretia Hildreth Saxl, from their home in
Harvard, Massachusetts
Harvard is a town in Worcester County, Massachusetts, United States. The town is located 25 miles west-northwest of Boston, in eastern Massachusetts. A farming community settled in 1658 and incorporated in 1732, it has been home to several ...
, was renamed Tensitron in 1953. Saxl is reported as having stated that he worked under
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein ( ; ; 14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist, widely acknowledged to be one of the greatest and most influential physicists of all time. Einstein is best known for developing the theory ...
.
[Maccabee, 1996.][Sopka, 1979.] He died in 1981.
Saxl is most well known for a series of controversial experiments in which he measured unexpected changes in the period of a
torsion pendulum
A torsion spring is a spring that works by twisting its end along its axis; that is, a flexible elastic object that stores mechanical energy when it is twisted. When it is twisted, it exerts a torque in the opposite direction, proportiona ...
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
''Physical Review'' is a peer-reviewed scientific journal established in 1893 by Edward Nichols. It publishes original research as well as scientific and literature reviews on all aspects of physics. It is published by the American Physical S ...
'';
eventually the work was published in ''
Nature
Nature, in the broadest sense, is the physics, physical world or universe. "Nature" can refer to the phenomenon, phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general. The study of nature is a large, if not the only, part of science. ...
''.
In the early 1960s, Saxl began a collaboration with
Mildred Allen of
Mount Holyoke College
Mount Holyoke College is a private liberal arts women's college in South Hadley, Massachusetts. It is the oldest member of the historic Seven Sisters colleges, a group of elite historically women's colleges in the Northeastern United States.
...
. In 1971, Saxl and Allen published a report of anomalous changes in the period of a torsion pendulum during a
solar eclipse
A solar eclipse occurs when the Moon passes between Earth and the Sun, thereby obscuring the view of the Sun from a small part of the Earth, totally or partially. Such an alignment occurs during an eclipse season, approximately every six month ...
in 1970 and hypothesized that “gravitational theory needs to be modified”.
[Schilling, 2004] In addition, they observed unexplained diurnal variation in the period of the pendulum.
[Duif and Water, 1996] 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
[Van Flandern and Yang, 2003] 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.
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20th-century American physicists
1904 births
1981 deaths
Austrian emigrants to the United States
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